Every year, the Skills Minister writes to the Chief Executive of the Skills Funding Agency (SFA), setting out the government's vision for skills funding priorities for the forthcoming funding year. It sets out in headline terms how 19+ funding will work from August 2016.
One of the major changes to previous years is the appearance of a new budget line; the Adult Education Budget (or, because we love our Three Letter Acronyms, the AEB).
This £1.5bn budget is intended to support all adult learning outside of Apprenticeships. This consolidates the previous Adult Skills Budget, Community Learning and Discretionary Learner support. One of the questions that needs to be answered by the Skills Funding Agency (SFA) is how previously separated aspects of separate budgets are allocated if they are all now part of a ‘common’ AEB.
In the letter, the Minister has tasked the SFA with allocating the ‘AEB in line with the government’s responsibilities and legal duties’ – I anticipate that the SFA will provide more detail on how this breaks down to specific qualifications and programmes in its response to the sector, due to be published soon.
The other key headlines from the letter are:
Co-funding of learning in the workplace (where both the SFA and employers fund learning outside of an Apprenticeship) will cease in 2016-17, as the minster feels ‘employers should fund learning in the workplace’. I anticipate we’ll get further guidance from the SFA around methods of delivery and specific qualification approval for funding in the New Year.
Another key theme set out in the letter is simplification, with the minister looking to streamline vocational education into “clear high quality vocational technical education routes”. More detail will follow in the spring as part of the governments’ review of technical and professional education.
On the topic of Apprenticeships, 2016-17 will be the last year in which the government will solely fund Apprenticeships through its grant funding. After that, the intention is that Apprenticeships will be funded through the levy system announced in the Autumn Statement.
The letter states that from 2016-17, Advanced Leaner Loans will be made available to learners aged 19+ studying approved qualifications at level 3 to 6. Learners aged 19-23 who haven’t got their first ‘full’ level 3 will still get full funding for these qualifications, and won’t have to take a loan to fund it.
Expansion of Traineeships – from August 2016 the requirement that only Ofsted ‘Good’ or ‘Outstanding’ providers can deliver Traineeships will be been removed,“to enable more providers to deliver Traineeships and ultimately more young people to benefit from them”.
The statutory requirement for fully funded maths and English in the AEB will still be in place, supporting “Functional Skills and approved stepping stone qualifications and achievement of a GCSE”.
The Minister has set out that his intention for the Offender Learning and Skills Service budget, “protecting it in cash terms across the Spending Review period”. However, “further decisions about prison education generally, and about commissioning arrangements from 2016-17 particularly, will be announced in early 2016.”
On the issue of localisation, city regions and localities who have agreed devolution agreements with central government will be able to decide how their AEB is allocated and spent. Throughout 2016-17, the SFA has been tasked with working on how they will ‘devolve’ aspects of the AEB.
We’re anticipating that a lot more detail will be released by the SFA in their more comprehensive response soon. In the meantime, watch this space.
