Work experience hours planned but not taken place-funding impact

So for the non placement learners, if an auditor looked at your planned hours upon enrolment, they would differ from what's in the ILR?

The ILR overall hours would match the overall planned programme hours on the learning agreement. However, the hours attributed to WEX individual aim on the LA would differ from the ILR as it has not been delivered; the aim is a non-start on ILR.  The hours we planned for WEX external activity but havent been able to deliver are absorbed into other additional EEP activity.

For some students a placement has not been possible, so we deliver additional EEP or employer engagement. 

Do we need to remove the hours attributed to WEX from the ILR or can we still claim funding as it was planned and realistic but circumstances meant it was not delivered but the hours have been filled with other EEP activity. 

what do other providers do for WEX as we all know sourcing placements and getting students to attend them can be tricky.

I was told to treat work placement as an add on to the overall programme. From experience you can only claim the placement hours if you can show that it either went ahead or it was planned and agreed with the employer but for some reason it didn't happen (backed up with employer confirmation)

Auditors would check to see if removing the hours would drop the learner down a banding which is when you start potentially getting funding errors. 

We never put placements on the plan until we get a good understanding of the learners attendance etc. If a learner goes out on placement we have a process to amend the original learning plan and remove an EEP aim that hasn't been opened and add on the work placement one. But we make sure the overall hours don't change. 

We do add WEX hours from the start if it's a programme where they do generally get placements for everyone. We've found at audit, that if the vast majority of the cohort did a placement, and one or two didn't, they've been ok with that since it is obviously the realistic plan that they would. As Chris says, if you've got evidence that it was arranged with a particular employer but just failed to go ahead, that's fine (unless you've got a pattern of that happening a lot).

Some courses do a check around Easter, and any students where we've claimed WEX hours but it's now looking unlikely, they put on replacement internal timetabled EEP activity for those.

We do usually have a number where we have to reduce planned hours late in the year, where the curriculum team haven't replaced activity and there's no evidence that the plan was realistic (and the WEX hours made a difference to band, which isn't always the case). It's frustrating, but we have to believe what curriculum teams tell us is going to happen, but we also then have to make sure our planned hours will meet audit requirements.

Thanks both; very helpful responses.