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Oh I'm not confusing them, I know the fact that most of the time them both being 20% is incidental, I was just wondering if the EPA cost being 25% would have any impact on the split. Presumably then, given that it's 80/20 all the time, it would be 75%(training)+5%(portion of EPA) for the OPPs and 20%(remaining portion of EPA) for completion.
I'm not actually entirely clear why we even split the TNPs, as they're always treated as a single lump for funding purposes, with no distinction at all. I presume it's just so they can keep an eye on what proportion of our price is going to the EPAOs? It does rather confuse people as they try and treat them separately. In every calculation I do, I just add them together and treat then as a single price, the split is irrelevant for my purposes.
I understand that Finance might want to know that, where the Assessment price is >20% of the total, and a student withdraws just before gateway, we actually get to keep some Assessment funding that would have been earmarked to go straight to the EPAO (assuming the EPAO don't make us pay even when the student didn't sit the EPA). I've never thought of that before. It equally means that, if the assessment price is <20%, we can lose Training funding despite having delivered all the training.
Ben James
On programme payments split
Edited
Having a bit of a discussion with one of our financial analysts regarding how OPPs are paid and wanted to get people's perspectives. We have a situation whereby a cohort of learners have a negotiated EPA cost which represents 25% of the agreed overall TNP (i.e. training and assessment combined) which we've never had before, leaving 75% for training rather than the 80%+ we usually see.
Given the 80/20 split for OPPs/completion payment, would our monthly instalments be inclusive of the 75% training cost, plus 5% of the EPA cost? Then, as/when the learner completes their EPA, we'll get the remaining EPA costs as the 20% completion payment. Or, would our OPPs be inclusive of only the 75% training price, and we get 25% upon completion (20% as a completion payment, 5% as a 'balancing' payment of sorts)?
I know how it works the other way round, as in if the training cost/EPA costs were split 85/15 - 80% paid in on programme payments, with the completion being the 15% EPA cost, plus 5% of the training costs that wouldn't be paid as OPPs.. but I was just curious as to how it worked if the EPA costs were greater.