Release 6.1 - 19th August 2025

Funding Rules / Compliance Enhancements

The following updates will be released:

• New application compliance questions
• Foundation Apprenticeships
• Training Plan
• Bootcamp Category Codes
• Bud Assist

Please see below for more information on each section.

Compliance Questions

We have added new compliance questions to the "Additional personal details" page of the application for 2025/26 applications. These questions relate to prisoners and prison leavers:

• "Is the applicant a prisoner or prison leaver?"
• If "Yes" is answered to the above, then two additional questions will be displayed:
  • "Please confirm the applicant's current prison status"
  • "Is the applicant happy to inform their employer that they are currently or were previously a prisoner?"

The same questions will also be displayed to the applicant if you invite them to self-enrolment.

All questions and answers will be displayed on the Applicant Summary document, to be signed by the learner.

The questions are optional to answer. Any existing learners already enrolled for 2025/26 will have the new questions when they next go through the enrolment edit flow but they will be optional and can be skipped.

Foundation Apprenticeships

We have added two updates to Foundation Apprenticeships in Bud's enrolment process:

1. Filtering on the programme selection page
2. Additional compliance questions and eligibility warnings

Programme Filtering

On the "Progtamme details" page of the application, you will now be able to filter the programme list by the type of programme. Four options will be shown in the dropdown:

• All
• Standard
• Foundation Apprenticeship
• Framework

The default will be "All".

Foundation Apprenticeship - eligibility warnings

We have added two eligibility warnings to the "Candidate Overview" page in the application workflow:

• Age - when the learner is aged 25+, we will display a warning on the "Basic personal details" page that the learner is not eligible for a Foundation Apprenticeship, per funding rule para.130.
• Consent to share information - where the apprentice does not provide consent to share their prisoner or care leaver status with their employer, we will display a warning on the "Additional personal details" page that the learner is not eligible for a Foundation Apprenticeship, per funding rule para.132.

Training Plan

We have removed the old Appendix C from the 2025/26 version of the Training Plan document. This appendix previously showed the old 20% OTJH calculation that is no longer relevant to new apprentices.

Bootcamps

We have added the following bootcamp category codes to Bud:

• Z0010407: Skills Bootcamp: Teaching Assistant (Wave 5) (PTP)
• Z0060542: Skills Bootcamps - Community exercise, physical activity, sport and health - Level 4 equivalent
• Z0060504: Skills Bootcamps - Digital Business Services - Level 2 equivalent
• Z0060456: Skills Bootcamps - Management and Administration - Level 2 equivalent 

The category codes will be available for selection in the programme builder following the release.

Bud Assist

We have updated Bud Assist to include information relevant to the latest academic year.

Bug Fixes

In this release, we have fixed the following bugs:

Document snapshots - Continuing our drive to improve the compliance experience in Bud, we have made further improvements to the way snapshots are created which should reduce, or eliminate, the number of failed snapshots on compliance documents. 

Customers should see no direct changes to the way snapshots are created, aside from the possibility of a small delay before the snapshot created message is displayed. The changes have been made to the Application Summary document and Application agreement in this release. A follow-up release will extend the improvements to the training plan and funding documents.  

Evidence packs failing - We had reports of a very small number of evidence packs failing to download. The root cause was identified as special characters used in activity titles. We have now resolved this so packs will no longer fail.

Evidence packs with English and Maths activities - We have removed the OTJT references from English and Maths activities downloaded in an Evidence Pack. This will match the behaviour of the platform to hide OTJH from English and Maths activities.

Business Intelligence - Wednesday 20th August at 15:30

QAR Updates

Following the updates from the DfE on the QAR methodology the following updates have been made. These affect both the 24-25 and 25-26 QAR. Please note, you may see a change in your QAR values following this release to account for the adjusted calculations.

Overdue Planned Breaks

The overdue planned break methodology has been changed so the flag will only be set where 

• The learners does not have a corresponding restart record in the same funding year
• The learner does not have a corresponding restart record or continuation of break record in the following funding year

This will likely mean that very few overdue break flags will be set and any break that is continuing into the year as expected will simply be excluded from the QAR regardless of the timeliness of their return. Details on the DfE update can be found here.

No longer matching to R04 data

As per the technical update here: we have removed the part of the calculation that checks your previous year QAR against R01-R04 of the following year. This means that the QAR value for 24-25 will only look at 24-25 ILRs up to and including R14. As suggested by the DfE this means your R14 QAR values are the final values they will be publishing. The previous year QAR will remain on the report for the year so you are still able to cross reference to DfE data.

Bug – missing apprenticeship names

We have fixed a bug which appeared over the ILR crossover period whereby some standards were appearing as blank. This should now be resolved. Please note, you may need to upload a new 25-26 ILR to trigger a report refresh to see this fix.

Finance Reports – Short duration additional payments 

Following the 25-26 funding rule changes, adjustments have been made to the finance reports to reflect additional payments being made in the correct time period for short duration apprenticeships. The adjustments are as follows: