16-19 Max Hours in Year

Ooh, that's a fun one... I'd *strongly* advise you to ask *any* starters after Christmas to tell you *exactly* what they've been doing since the start of the year for precisely this reason.

ESFA have been known to get itchy about this but they only get really itchy where there's an overlap in dates (and, since they took away the FRM that tells us, it's basically impossible for us to be sure).

563 (although I'm not sure where you got that number from) is, at least, under band 5/full time (580 hours), so the learner was part time with them and part time with you BUT, strictly speaking, only one provider should claim per Study Programme learner each year (it's very different from Adult Classroom where it's fine for multiple providers to claim the same learner on different aims). This is obviously a proper edge case if they were only with provider 1 til Christmas and then there's a three month gap til they joined you, this has to be better than the learner being NEET for the rest of the year...

With a single provider, the only limit is, as you say, 40 hours a week, it's just the money doesn't go up after 580 in the academic year.

Right, with you, could've been actually anything in the ILR, *but* if she genuinely completed early they should've reduced her hours anyway (should've...).

There's not really a "proper" fulltime/part-time definition for SPs? "Fulltime" kind of only means Band 5 (580 hours in the academic year), a 16 or 17 year old doing 550 hours is nominally part-time...

I don't think they would need to reduce the hours as she was on all the aims for at least 6 weeks. 
Its a shame that FRM doesn't flag these but if the tools aren't there, other than re-pulling every PLR before hard close then what should we do?. Like you say better to be with a provider than on the NEET figures. 

If she was *that* early a *completer* (of her whole programme) then they have to reduce her hours as well.

And, as always, if it's one or two individuals and you can tell the auditor the tale, then you'll likely be fine, they've got much bigger fish to fry.

I thought if the learner stays on all their aims past 6 weeks you don't have to reduce the overall ILR hours to show what you have just delivered? 

Oh, hold on, I've confused myself!

You're right, you only reduce the hours if they complete early to move on to an Apprenticeship Programme with the same organisation (as long as the whole cohort hasn't "completed early", but that's a different scenario)

Haha you had me scrambling for a PDSAT report that I thought I had totally missed off this year.