Change of employer exactly 30 days

Hi Christina - you would have to withdraw the apprentice from the time they left the previous employer and restart from the date they start with the new employer. This is required to prevent funds being paid while the apprentice is not employed.

Steven's suggestion will almost certainly work, but depending on your interpretation of the "within 30 days" rule, another solution may be deleting the additional ACT line you have added because you only need to add a new one if the old employer/new employer have different contract types (i.e. one is Employer and one is ESFA). The rules state;

It is ok if it is not over 30 days.

You only enter a new ACT record if has changed, if it has then there must be no gap between the closed and start of the records.

Apologies Christina - I've just checked and the guidance that was provided in August that I quoted above was subsequently superseded by the one below....... 

Martin - out of interest do you know how that works with the monthly funding? If there is no break in learning and no gap between the ACT codes what would happen to funding?

If an apprentices leaves on the 20th March and joins a new employer on the 10th April how does the funding system know how to process the March payment?

You will note that the employment status and financial details only record a date from and not a date to, so any gap is not included in the funding calculation (that is why the rule limits the gap to 30 days).

HTH

Not sure I follow. The employment status would still be against the previous employer as there is no end date, and the new employer wouldn't have started until after the funding process runs? Similar with the financial details, they would still be aligned to the previous employer based on the start date, and no new funding record until the 10th of the following month?

At the end of March ESFA will run the funding process, so presumably the previous employer would pay from their levy if they haven't stopped the record on AS. If they were a levy payer ESFA would pay 90/95% but expect the TP to collect the remaining 5/10% from the previous employer?

Apologies if I'm missing something obvious.

The funding calculations for within 30 days use the start date with the new employer as the end date for the previous employer.

So that would mean the previous employer paying for a month after they have actually left, which they wouldn't expect to under the funding rules.

No, the previous employer would only be paying for the month the learner was in employment and training and not the month after they have left as this would be funded by the new employer.

I think this change was to overcome the previous inflexibility in the rules and avoids the need to create new records when a learner changes employer and has a small gap between employers.

HTH

Thanks Martin - Sorry to labour this but I'm jut trying to get my head around how this would be coded in ILR. I argued this point with ESFA back and forth recently regarding apprentices that change employer and have a small gap in employment, but they insisted I had to withdraw and restart to prevent funds being paid while the apprentice wasn't in employment.

So if an apprentice left on the 20th March and started again on 10th April, the TNP 3 and 4 codes would match the new employer start date, the new ACT From Date (if required) would also match the new employer start date, and the old ACT To date would have to be the day before the new ACT From date so there is no gap?

Hi All,

Many thanks for your responses, originally we didn't have the additional ACT code in place but we have a DLOCK and I was wondering if that was the cause of it.  We just don't seem to be able to clear it., back to the drawing board I go.

Thank you

What is the Dlock error?

Hi Martin,

the DLOCK is 

But the ILR from what i can tell matches, the ULN is a match, the DOB the funding start date and the TNPs add up to the price on the AS.

This is the ILR

I've taken out the employer name but the employer name is the new placement so appears to be correct, and the record on the AS appears correct.

The Dlock error is ‘The training provider used a different standard code’.

The training provider needs to check they’ve entered the correct standard code for the apprentice’s training course that’s in the employer’s apprenticeship service account.

But as the codes (118) are the same on the ILR and DAS I expect this is one of the known issues on the AS, check if you are receiving payments if you are then all is ok otherwise I would report this to the Apprenticeship service.

HTH

Thank you, it looks as though we are receiving payments albeit the Apps Monthly Payment report doesn't appear to be applying the TNP3 until March rather than the November date and the Employer identifier is showing as the previous employer on both ZPROG records.

I will email the AS and see what they say.

Thank you for your help, Martin.