Apprenticeship Funding Rules

The following updates will be released:

• New questions for 19+ learners opt in/out of Functional Skills
• Academic year selection for applications
• New OTJ values per standard
• 8-month minimum duration in application
• New activity types for English and Maths

Please see below for more information on each section.

19+ Functional Skills

New questions have been added to the "Initial Assessment Discussion" page to capture the outcome & reason for whether 19+ learners will be working on Functional Skills. We have added these to a new section on the page specifically for Maths and English. The answers will be displayed on the Training Plan document.

The questions will not be shown to learners aged under 19.

The questions will not determine any logic for exempting Functional Skills from the learning plan. You will still need to exempt the Functional Skills like you do today, prior to capturing the outcome and reason on the "Initial Assessment Discussion" page.

Academic Year Selection

When creating new applications, it will be mandatory to select one of the following academic years:

• 2025-26
• 2024-25 & earlier

The selection will be made when creating the sub record for the application.

There will be another chance to change your selection on the "Candidate Overview" page.

The selection will determine two key things for the application:

• Minimum duration validation – either 8 months (25/26) or 12 months (24/25 & earlier)
• Minimum OTJ – either the set values per standard (25/26) or the 20% calculation (24/25 & earlier)

At the time of releasing this, we will default all existing applications to 24/25 & earlier.

It will not be possible to edit the academic year during the application edit flow after the initial enrolment.

Please note that we have decided not to include the academic year selection in the API to create applications. We appreciate you may not know the academic year at this point. For applications created via the API, you will be able to make the selection on the "Candidate Overview" page in Bud.

Please note that changing the academic year will reset any previously collected signatures on application documents and clear the information entered on the "Set programme dates" page. This is to ensure that the correct logic can be applied to the applications, based on their start date, to help with compliance of the funding rules.

When releasing this update, we automatically applied the academic year to the applications where the programme start date was known - e.g. start date = 02/08/2025, so the academic year was set to 2025-26. Where the start date was not known, we were unable to set the academic year and the next time you enter the application it will be mandatory for you to select it manually. Doing this will reset any previously collected signatures on application documents and clear the information entered on the "Set programme dates" page.

New OTJ Values

For applications in the 2025-26 academic year, we will return the set value per standard as per the DfE's Annex C of the funding rules. This will continue to be shown on the Apprenticeship Agreement and Training Plan documents. We have also made changes in the learning plan to ensure that the correct minimum OTJ value is displayed on the OTJ metrics and the Gateway checklist.

We are aware that the Department for Education plan to make further changes to this policy in July, however we had already completed this work and as it currently stands, this is the most up-to-date official publication by the DfE. To pre-empt the possibility of transition values for some standards, we are currently working on upgrading how we store the values in our database to allow us to store multiple OTJ values per standard with different "effective from" dates.

We'll continue to monitor DfE comms and update the platform as quickly as possible.

For applications in the 2024-25 & earlier academic years, we will continue to use the existing 20% calculation to determine the minimum OTJ value.

Minimum duration

For applications in the 2025-26 academic year, you will be able to enter a practical period duration of 8 months or more. If you attempt to enter a duration of under 8 months, then you will receive an error and will not be able to proceed with the application.

The "Set Programme Start Date" page where you enter the duration is otherwise unchanged. So for now you are still required to enter the learner's working hours and that will use your programme settings to default the durations.

e.g. Your programme settings are 30+ hours = 12 month duration. So when you enter the learner's 30+ hours in the application, the end date will default to 12 months after the start date. You will then be able to manually adjust this to anything over 8 months.

You are also able to create or edit standard programmes to have a duration of 8 months or more.

For applications in the 2024-25 & earlier academic years, we will continue to restrict the minimum duration to 12 months.

English and Maths

We have added two new activity types that can be added to your programmes:

• English
• Maths

The intention here is that you will be able to create activities specifically for English and Maths learning to provide a clear distinction between that and the normal activities for the standard.

Key points:

• You will be able to edit your existing programmes to create & add these new activity types to your live standards, so there is no need to create whole new programmes.
• You can add English and Maths activities to the Activity Library and then add them to your programmes from there.
• You will be able to change the activity type for any existing activities in the Activity Library to the new English and Maths type. So if you already have existing activities specifically for English and Maths learning but under a different type (e.g. Assignment) then you will be able to quickly change that activity type to one of the new ones.
• The new activity types for English and Maths will behave like all other activity types, with the exception that there will be no OTJ values associated with them and no means of tracking hours.

In a future release, we will have two more updates for English and Maths:

• A new Appendix on the Training Plan document to show all English and Maths activities. This will separate them from the standard activities.
• A new report allowing you to track learning against these two new activity types.

Further Funding Rule Updates

We are continuing work on further updates relating to the new Apprenticeship funding rules. You can find out more about future developments by following this article.

ILR Specification Updates

In preparation for the new the new academic year, we have commenced development of the ILR specification changes (V2 – April 2025). A full list of changes that have been made can be viewed via the knowledgebase article below. Where changes are “non-breaking” i.e. adding “valid to” and “valid from” labels these will be released at the earliest possible opportunity. Changes which effect behavior from the start of the academic year only will not be made visible until the first day of the academic year.

2025-26 ILR Specification Changes

Bug Fixes

In this release, we have fixed the following bugs:

User Management performance improvements - To address customer reports of performance degradation and intermittent page errors in the user management section of Bud we have made several changes in the background to help improve this situation. These changes will be closely monitored for effectiveness and may form part of continued improvements in this area.  

TNP values updating in cross-over period when changing employer - As part of the ongoing preparations for the upcoming change of academic year we have made advanced changes to the logic around changing TNP values in the ILR if there is a change of employer during this period. This will prevent change being reflected in the pervious academic year, when the change has occurred in the dates between the start of the new academic year and hard-close (i.e. when multiple ILRs are able to be edited).

Group Learning Submission: First Name appears twice - We have resolved a cosmetic issue where a group learning activity submission shows the learners first name twice instead of first name and Surname as expected.

Group activities: Selecting activities causes a web page error - We have addressed an issue where your tenancy has the “group management” feature enabled and you select the activities tab, then on occasions the web page may have failed to load.  

Coming Soon - API Enhancements

We are making significant improvements to our API offering, aimed at giving you a more reliable, robust and scalable experience.

You can read more about what this means to existing API Customers, and the additional benefits we are adding in the below article.  

For more information about the changes we are implementing, please see this article.

Business Intelligence - Wednesday 9th July @ 15:30

Application Sectors - We have made some amendments to the sector fields in both the Standard and Management Reports that focus on applications, this should mean that learners in application stage have a more accurately assigned sector pulled from the programme details where it has been added as well as allocating a sector for OST learners where present. 

Standard reports: ALS Missing Signatures - A new report has been added to our standard report suite to detail ALS Plans with missing signatures. This page will show learners who have an ALS plan but have not signed it. You can use this report to monitor current ALS plans to ensure they get signed promptly. Additionally, historic and closed plans can also be viewed for audit purposes however an ALS Plan cannot be signed in the platform once it has been closed.

This report can be accessed through the main navigation in the compliance section of the report, through a link in the learning support page and within the compliance footer.

Data Warehouse Fields

In this release we have added the below new fields to the datawarehouse.  

Please note, the Criteria table is populated with data from the DfE and so may contain criteria you do not deliver. These tables can be used to map programmes, activities, learning outcomes and criteria together to aid programme creation and monitoring.

User fields have also been added to the Application Edits tables, this means that the user who made the edit can be found in these fields and the trainer fields will identify the primary trainer associated with the application. 

Note for ETL and Report developers - As mentioned in previous release notes, in this release we will be removing [Presentation].[Application (Dates)] as this has for some time been superseded by [Presentation].[Application Status History].  Please ensure your ETLs and in-house reports are prepared to accept this change where necessary to limit the impact on your connections. 

Addendum for release 5.15

In a late addition to release 5.15 we are happy to announce that we have been able to include additional fixes for high priority bugs.

Application signatures being wiped unexpectedly. We have been able to resolve, for new applications forward of the release date, an issue which saw application signatures being reset in the edit flow even if no changes had been made. This issue only affected users where the edit flow was accessed more than once following their sign-up. For new enrolments, going through the edit flow more than once (NB: signatures will always be re-set on the first pass of the edit-flow by default) the previously captured signatures will no longer be reset IF no changes have been made during the edit flow process. If changes are made, then the default behavior will be to require new signatures to be collected to reflect the change.  

Programme activities display invalid dates after edit-flow. We have made changes to the underlying behaviour around the propagation of learning plan activities. When an activity is added to a programme with a target start date that is earlier than the current date, then that activity will not appear in the learner's learning plan after the edit flow has been completed. 
For example if a learner is in their 6th month of their programme, and the activities for months 1-5 are updated at the programme level, then these changes will not propagate through to the learner. If the learner was in month 2 of their programme when the changes were made then activities for months 3-5 would be added.