Ruth Canham-James

Apprenticeship Financial Type - Price Reduction

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Do you think we need to record a RIP value if the price has been reduced due to a change or provider, or a restart after a full withdrawal? It is partly to do with prior learning, but not always entirely. We might be reducing a £10k band max apprenticeship to £5k, despite the student only having done 20% of the KSBs, purely because the first provider took half the band max, but didn't deliver much. Based purely on RPL, that's only a 10% reduction (£1k). We do always do a Skills Scan for a change of employer, but we don't do one if it was a full withdrawal and restart with us, we just work out how much funding is left and record that. If we over/under delivered in the first period, it balances out fairly over their second period, but the price reduction isn't strictly based on RPL.

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Ruth Canham-James

Same question for Reduced Hours field. That one is more likely to reflect just RPL, as it's completely within our control, it's not restricted like price. We can choose to reduce the hours by only 20% of the usual hours, even if we had to reduce the price by 50%.

Steve Hewitt

(I know you know but) The problem is the system can't conceive of a provider getting money and not delivering...

I'd make sure the money was right and hang the RPL because there's nothing more annoying than having £7k in the TNPs and only getting paid £5k.

Ruth Canham-James

That's the other thing, what is even being done with this info? It doesn't impact on funding or compliance or anything I can think of. We know we're compliant with hours and we don't charge above what's left in the band, that's the important bit.

Ruth Canham-James

I got a DfE reply with nothing specific but the general vibe that reductions only include RPL, which is what it says, but this is a weird scenario.

So, if it's a change of provider, we'll use a Skills Scan to indicate what the price was reduced by, knowing full well we're reducing by more than that because we always do with a change of provider (even if only because we only have to reduce the price by 50% of the RPL identified). Hours will be exactly what was identified on the Skills Scan.

If it's a restart after a full withdrawal, we'll just record the whole price reduction as RPL. That doesn't quite follow the "reduce price based on 50% of RPL", but we're not doing a new Skills Scan on these if their previous period was with us, so that's all we have. Hours reduction will be normal hours minus hours we're doing on this period.

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