The government has watered down controversial changes to GCSE resit funding rules.
Ministers today ditched plans to introduce a weekly minimum of three hours of teaching for English and four hours for maths. Instead, colleges will need to deliver 100 hours of teaching for each subject at any point in the academic year.
Plans to move to a 0 per cent tolerance threshold have also been shelved. The government will instead only reduce the rate from the current 5 per cent to 2.5 per cent.
The changes, announced in guidance published this afternoon, will come into effect in the 2025/26 academic year.
The Association of Colleges welcomed the relaxing of the new teaching hours requirements but warned that colleges will “still struggle to deliver them” due to the teacher recruitment crisis.
Cath Sezen, AoC’s director of education policy, said the decision to only halve the tolerance threshold is also “positive”, even though this looks “unrealistic given the very poor attendance of so many students in schools in key stage 4”.
She added, however, that it was “disappointing” that DfE has decided to go ahead with the additional conditions of funding rather than delaying any decision until the Becky Francis’ independent curriculum and assessment review, which is expected to recommend changes to resit rules, has concluded.
Andrew Otty, a former DfE post-16 English and maths policy lead, said the changes are “disappointing to see” as abandoning the removal of the tolerance would impact “the most disadvantaged and vulnerable” students.
DfE reduces resit teaching hours
The divisive “condition of funding” policy, introduced in 2014, means that colleges must help students who failed to achieve a pass – grade 4 or above – to retake their GCSEs, or else risk losing funding.
The Department for Education announced in February that it planned to introduce minimum teaching hours for the first time – initially as an “expectation” in 2024/25 before becoming a strict rule in 2025/26.
Under the initial proposal, colleges would have to deliver three hours of English teaching per week, which would total 99 hours over the course of a 33-week academic year.
And four hours of maths would total 132 hours.
Today’s change effectively removes the fourth planned teaching hour for maths.
DfE said it decided to alter the rule to 100 hours of teaching for each subject over the full academic year “in response to sector feedback, so institutions can use their professional judgement to timetable the hours in a way that is most beneficial to them and their students”.
The department repeated that the minimum teaching hours “must” be delivered as “stand-alone, whole-class, in-person teaching”.
Compliance with these requirements will be measured by data returns in the school census or individualised learner record (ILR). Funding will be clawed back if colleges and providers fail to hit the minimum hours.
Students that have an education, health and care plan or are on a supported internships are allowed to be taught the minimum hours in an “alternative format – for example, small group or embedded learning”.
While DfE agreed to reduce maths teaching hours, the department has “encouraged” colleges and providers to make “best efforts” to offer an extra 35 hours of teaching given pass rates for maths remain lower than those for English.
Gemma Simmons-Blench, deputy CEO at Luminate Education Group, said colleges “share policymakers’ ambitions” for young people to acquire high levels of English and maths skills, adding that providers need “greater and more flexible support to deliver this ambition, rather than increasingly rigid and punitive funding requirements”.
Ben Rowland, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, said the previously planned condition of funding requirements were a “step too far”.
He told FE Week: “The extra delivery hours when there are no incentives on teacher recruitment would have been particularly challenging, especially when there is a real sector-wide challenge on recruitment, retention and pay.”
Sezen said colleges are seeing “huge numbers” of students who have not got their grade 4 in school, “putting enormous pressure on staff and students alike”.
She added that many colleges struggle to recruit and retain the staff needed to teach, and some do not have the physical space to accommodate them all.
The AoC wants the “barriers colleges face” to be taken into account when they have their audits.
DfE backtrack on zero tolerance
Currently, colleges are allowed to be non-compliant with the condition of funding rule up to a threshold of 5 per cent of in-scope learners.
Funding is removed for each student above the tolerance level at half the national funding rate.
DfE previously announced they would halve the tolerance to 2.5 per cent in the academic year 2025/26, which will impact funding allocations in the 2027/28 academic year.
This plan is still going ahead, but the proposed next step of scrapping the tolerance altogether in 2026/27 has now been dropped.
It is understood that the DfE decided to clamp down on the resits policy after internal research showed the most economically disadvantaged students were not meeting the condition of funding, and the tolerance was being misused.
FE Week analysis showed that colleges would be hit with fines of around £45 million annually if 0 per cent tolerance was introduced, based on recent trends.
Setting the tolerance at 2.5 per cent “ensures as many students as possible get support for English and maths, whilst acknowledging that (despite institutions’ efforts) it may not be appropriate to deliver this support to every student – for example, those at risk of dropping out”, the DfE said today.
Colleges and providers have been told to use their “professional judgement to consider what support for English and maths is appropriate for students who have been opted out under the tolerance, and their exclusion from the condition of funding should be regularly reviewed”.
Sezen said such a “tight” tolerance of 2.5 per cent “might punish colleges with the most inclusive approach to recruitment, something I am sure ministers do not want to see happening”.
Otty, who left the DfE last year, said: “It is disappointing to see DfE putting non-teacher lobbyists ahead of students. The fourth hour for maths has been funded by Treasury for three years now because those resitting maths are more likely to be starting from a grade 2 or lower, so it should be well embedded.
“We all know the 2.5 per cent of students denied English and maths teaching in the tolerance loophole will be the most disadvantaged and vulnerable.”
Headline would be more correct if it said “DfE moves ahead with tighter rules for 2025-6 which will increase costs in a year in which there may be a very limited % funding increase”