Applicable funding rate from ESOL hours

Hi Paul

This is a thing where, if you deliver ESOL in (significantly) more hours than the qual is banded for, you can claim the excess. Comes with pretty stringent audit reqs though, so only worth it if you're way over.

Details in P65 and 66 here:

DfE funded adult skills fund: funding rates and formula 2024 to 2025 - GOV.UK

We have noticed that Gateway hours (120) are more than CG hours (73) for certain ESOL aims on LARS.

We are delivering CG aims in 120 hours but getting funding for 73 hours so it might be worth investigating further.

Ah yes, the great C&G ESOL fudge!

So, the history of this is C&G didn't want their ESOL quals to be the same as everyone else's when the Qualification and Credit Framework was introduced (2013ish?), because they didn't want people to be able to move from one AO to another (ie the whole point of QCF), so most of their ESOL awards are a different size to everyone else's. This didn't really matter in the Matrix days as almost all of them fell in the same bands but the new model has stuffed them. I understand that C&G have now got Ofqual to standardise their hours to everyone else's and I *believe* this will be reflected in the 25/26 rates, so it should just be a one year issue...

I'd be very careful that I knew my registers were absolutely perfect before applying it though, it's like catnip to auditors!!!

When we set up a course the additional hours would be planned, would this be a problems, as we could evidence the plan to a auditor?

Should then reconcile the planned to the actual for each learner at the end of the course?

Not actual, never actual.

You'd need to make sure that the delivered hours were right though (so attendance isn't important, but the classes happening is!), so if there were cancelled classes you'd need to take the hours out.