The Skills Funding Agency (SFA) has published geographic funding data for the first time — ahead of devolution of the adult education budget.

It is based on learners’ postcodes and relates to non-apprenticeship adult skills budget (ASB) delivery in the 2014 to 2015 funding year.

The data sets out the proportion of provision that each provider delivers within both their home local authority and region.

The SFA’s weekly online Update bulletin said this afternoon: “We are publishing this data to support you in discussion with local government authorities in future adult education budget commissioning discussions.

“This will help establish a shared understanding of the current pattern of delivery,” a spokesperson added. “It will be particularly important if you work in areas that have a skills devolution agreement or a skills incentive pilot.”

The spokesperson said its allocations methodology would change in future years “to support the devolution of funding to local areas”.

But she added: “The publication of this [geographic funding] data does not presuppose what that methodology will look like or how funding will be distributed.

“Further information will be issued on this in due course.”

Providers were advised to contact their central delivery service adviser for more information.

For more analysis see the next edition of FE Week.

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7 Comments

  1. Sue Knottenbelt

    This is relevant and timely data. The other part of the equation is the data on which non local, non regional providers are delivering within a local authority area. This information used to be provided in the First Statistical Release Data set – the last data set in the public domain seems to be 2012-13. You can glean quite a bit about which providers are operating in which LA areas from the National Success Rate tables 2013-14, but the NSRT data for 2014-15 is not yet available. Although most of the “out of town” delivery is likely to be in apprenticeships, having this data set for 2014-15 now would be helpful, when looking at the implications of future “repatriation” of funding. Can this be done or can you direct us to where we can find it?

  2. Anna lyst

    This dataset is just one part of the postcode analysis surely. Shouldn’t delivery postcode go alongside this.

    It wouldn’t seem reasonable to carve up the funding geographically based on provider HQ postcode alone.

  3. Mike Farmer

    So far as I can tell, where providers are based in a two-tier County the ‘home’ local authority of the provider is defined by SFA in their spreadsheet as the County District rather than the County Council. Since Districts in the two-tier system do not have any statutory authority over education at any level, I am at a loss to understand why SFA has taken this decision. Inevtiably, such providers appear to have a very low percentage of participation from their ‘home’ local authority. So … if this is intended by SFA to help providers in their discussions with their local authorities, which are much more likely to be the County Councils in rural areas, this dataset is pretty unhelpful. It would have been much more sensible to have used the County Council as the ‘home’ local authority.

  4. Anonymous

    Just a note on drilling down to LEP level. They may have difficulty doing this as the LEP’s aren’t discrete areas at least not here. The Derby, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire (D2N2) LEP and the Sheffield City Region (SCR) LEP’s have a huge overlap covering Chesterfield and some large towns. Does this mean we can claim from both 🙂

    This is obviously another system to reduce bureaucracy interfering with education. Why claim from a single source when you can claim funding from 20 different regions 🙂

  5. It would be useful to also see some distance from centre analysis e.g. proportion delivered 10+, 25+, 50+ miles etc. Providers near to geo borders could have provision delivered only a few miles away but it’s in another ‘defined’ area. Perhaps authorities with devolved powers might talk to each other to agree a reciprocal funding allocation rather than providers having to deal with the bureaucracy.