Debbie Simpson

Senior Leader Apprenticeship Completion Payment (20%)

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I have posted the following to service desk, but wonder if anyone here is able to advise on how we recover from the following error please?

Our first apprentice completed Programme and EPA successfully on 29/06/20.

We returned apprentice as ‘completed’ in R13 on the 19/20 ILR, but did not put an Achievement date in – just an outcome of ‘Achieved’. We now realise we should have added the Achievement date and the award (ME) but as this was our first apprentice we omitted these fields in error.

The last payment we received for the Apprentice on the Apps Indicative Earnings Report was March 2020, which was his Learning end date. 

Is it likely that we will receive the 20% award payment for this apprentice? It isn't showing on our return so far.

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Ruth Canham-James

If you continue to report the Achievement date of June 2020, I don't think you will ever get the completion payment. ESFA don't release funds that were due in a year that is now closed, if you didn't manage to report it by the R14 of that year. Same would apply for a students that started in July, but you didn't put in the ILR until November, you'd never get the July payment.

If you lied and said the achievement date was 01/08/2020, the completion payment would come through, though I don't recommend you do that!

I think you'll have to wait on the service desk to see if it's something you can put in a claim for. ESFA are hot on telling us if we've overclaimed in a closed year, and will claw back, so I would hope they have a mechanism to claim money you should have had from last year, and just made an admin error. I've never tried, so not sure.

Debbie Simpson

Hi Ruth, thanks for your reply. The Apprentice has now disappeared from our ILR, so no chance of entering a date. I will have to await the mercy of the Service desk - I will post here what happens.

It is annoying though, that the ILR throws out errors for every conceivable field entry but allows this type of silent fail :(

Steve Hewitt

Having spotted something similar with a client last week, I was thinking it would be nice to have a violation rule warning where a Standard is set to 2 & 1 but there's no AchDate...

Let me see if I can remember who was looking at the violations and I'll suggest it.

Debbie Simpson

@Steveh - thank you Steve!

(Edited)

Ruth Canham-James

We buy some funding optimisation software (SCORE) that works nicely alongside DSATS and FRM reports. The ESFA reports tell us where we've claimed too much, but not where we might have underclaimed (funny that). The one we pay for shows us where we might have underclaimed (plus some useful cross year checks). I'll suggest this as a validation for them too if they don't already have it, and I'll build it into our internal validation too. Thanks for the heads up on that.