Clair Ayling

Digital Apprenticeship Service Admin Responsibility

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I am trying to get an understanding of how other providers deal with the administration of the Digital Apprenticeship Service since all funding now flows through the service.  We get permissions from most non-levy employers to add the apprenticeship details onto their reservations but this has turnd into quite an administrative burden and I wondered how others manage it? 

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Tracy Clement

It is a huge administrative burden and we have expanded our Funding admin Team as otherwise you will also end up with a pile of datalocks. Employers do funny things!!

 

Ruth Canham-James

We had to hire an entire full time new role to deal with Apprenticeships (we have around 1,000 apps on programme in any given year). Managing the DAS, chasing up cohorts on DAS but never enrolled, chasing up apprentices who managed to get enrolled with no DAS record yet, dealing with it when reservations aren't done in time, dealing with price changes, working out remaining funding in band for transfers from other providers, working out prices for change of employer, dealing with Breaks and restarts, dealing with stops, calculating insufficient funds, helping employers who are stuck, data locks, making sure employers have paid, and on and on. They work with the apps delivery team, the account managers, and employers.

And yes, employers do some extraordinarily odd things!

Tracy Clement

And then they stop funding for no reason or try to log in as our account instead of their own. We now have 2 full time staff. Must be saving the DfE a fortune!

Ruth Canham-James

The number of employers who add us as a linked employer instead of giving us permissions, despite clear instructions! That's another small job, identifying that and getting the employers to take us off.

Stopping records for breaks or completions causes no end of problems and potentially lost funding. It's absurd that DAS records can't be unstopped by the employer (I understand why providers can't do it), it wastes countless days of work every year dealing with mistakenly stopped records. It doesn't matter how clearly we tell employers never to stop records unless they have a dispute, they keep doing it anyway.

Clair Ayling

Thanks both for your feedback. We have been dealing with all of the issue you describe.  I think a review is required!