Reaching Gateway

In the funding rules Glossary, the definition of Gateway says "See 'Final Day'", which says:

Defined in legislation as the final day of the practical period. This is the equivalent of the learning end date on the ILR (there must be evidence of learning on this learning end date) and internally it is also referred to as the “gateway” between the practical period and the completion of the end-point assessment. The term ‘final day’ is used as a measure in the redundancy policy to determine if the apprentice will be fully funded to completion. 

Gateway is the last recorded OTJ, not a date when it was decided they were ready for EPA.

That makes sense.  Many thanks Ruth

We have been using last day of new learning as the end date for the Component aim but the date of gateway sign-off for the Programme Aim -  Ruth, I think you would suggest that we use the last new learning day for both? 

Martin Locock I'm not sure what you mean by "last day of new learning". Is that just OTJ activity?

The guidance says Gateway is "Defined in legislation as the final day of the practical period. This is the equivalent of the learning end date on the ILR (there must be evidence of learning on this learning end date)". There is no other end date in the ILR it could be referring to, other than Actual End Date (I wish they'd use matching terminology).

ILR spec says "For apprenticeship standards on a programme aim, the Learning Actual End Date will be completed after all learning has taken place".

Funding Guidance says "86.3. The learning end date must only be recorded when the last piece of training relevant to the standard has been delivered".

There's never any mention of Actual End Date being the day a decision is made on readiness. It doesn't help that the terminology varies by document, and it says things like "after all learning has taken place" rather than explicitly saying Actual End Date = Last Day of OTJ, but it's my opinion that there's enough to establish that this is what they mean.

If you were running a year long apprenticeship, and your start date was 01/03/2025, and your actual end date was 03/03/2026 (representing when sign-off was done), but the last evidenced OTJ was 25/02/2026, that won't show up as an validation error for being too short, but an auditor will claw back all your funding. That also makes me think that AED is last evidenced learning.

Thanks, it's much cleaner to have a single date.