Correspondence

EFA e-bulletin for schools, colleges, local authorities and other 16 to 19 providers: 17 March 2016

Published 17 March 2016

This correspondence was withdrawn on

This has been withdrawn as it’s out of date. The EFA e-bulletin has been replaced by ESFA Update.

1. Information: post-16 allocation statements for 2016 to 2017 academic year

Final allocation statements for special post-16 institutions (excluding student support allocations) and non-maintained special schools (NMSSs) (including student support allocations) will be available by 18 March 2016. All statements, including those uploaded in February 2016 are available on EFA Information Exchange and can be found in the ‘revenue funding’ folder under ‘AY 2016-17 (2016/17)’.

All statements issued so far to schools, academies and FE colleges exclude allocations of student support funding. We will shortly begin to upload revised statements inclusive of student support funding. We expect the revised statements for these institutions to be issued by 24 March 2016. These revised statements will not include any outcomes for business cases. Business cases will be processed after the deadline of 8 April 2016. Institutions will be informed of outcomes by the end of May 2016.

Final allocation statements for charitable and commercial providers will also be available on EFA Information Exchange by the end of March 2016 (including student support allocations).

If you have any queries about allocation statements, please refer to our allocations statements guidance or you can contact us via our online enquiry form. If you have any problems using EFA Information Exchange, please check our support guidance.

2. Information: consistent financial reporting (CFR) framework for 2016 to 2017

We have published the consistent financial reporting (CFR) framework for the 2016 to 2017 financial year.

The CFR framework provides a standard template for schools to collect information about their income and expenditure by financial years so governing bodies of maintained schools can provide local authorities with a financial statement each year.

3. Information: EFA Information Exchange improvements

In response to your feedback, we’ve made some improvements to EFA Information Exchange.

You can now give a star rating to questions and answers in Knowledge Centre. We’ll use your feedback to make improvements, so please do take a moment to rate answers as you use them. All EFA-funded providers can access Knowledge Centre via EFA Information Exchange.

We’ve also simplified naming convention requirements for when you upload documents to Document Exchange. The system now accepts documents with special characters in the title (such as hyphens) to reduce errors.

In Document Exchange we’ve also added a ‘document purpose’ field. This will ensure there’s a clear purpose recorded for every document we ask you to upload. When we next ask you to upload a document, we’ll make it clear for what purpose you’ll need to use.

Finally, we’ve added the ability for you to upload zip and zipx file formats to Document Exchange. If we need to ask you to upload anything in this format, we’ll provide clear instructions to help you do this.

If you have any issues using EFA Information Exchange, please follow our online guidance.