Correspondence

EFA e-bulletin for academies: 18 June 2015

Published 18 June 2015

This correspondence was withdrawn on 13 December 2019

This has been withdrawn as it’s out of date. The EFA e-bulletin has been replaced by ESFA Update.

1. Action: Academies Accounts Direction 2014 to 2015

Education Funding Agency (EFA) has published the Academies Accounts Direction 2014 to 2015 on 12 June 2015. This is the reference pack for you and your auditors to use when preparing and auditing your trust’s annual reports and financial statements.

The Charity Commission issued a new Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) in July 2014, effective for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2015. Therefore, there are 2 versions of the accounts direction this year: one based on SORP 2015 and one based on SORP 2005.

Which version you use will depend on your academy trust’s date of incorporation. Academy trusts whose:

• date of incorporation was before 1 January 2015 must use the Academies Accounts Direction 2014 to 2015 (SORP 2005)
• date of incorporation falls on or after 1 January 2015 must use the Academies Accounts Direction 2014 to 2015 (SORP 2015)

You will need to submit your financial statements and auditor’s management letter for the period ending 31 August 2015 to EFA by 31 December 2015.

You can also now register for our 10 July webinars (11am for academies; 2pm for auditors) on the financial framework.

2. Action: national non domestic rates (NNDR) claims

All academies, free schools, studio schools and UTCs can claim funding to pay for their national non-domestic rates (NNDR).

If you haven’t yet claimed for financial year 2015 to 2016, you should complete the online form available via the academies funding claims page on GOV.UK.

New academies that have opened since April 2014 can use the same form to claim for the 2014 to 2015 financial year.

3. Reminder: summer school census 2015 returns

The deadline has now passed for returning approved submissions for the summer school census. If you have not yet submitted your data, please ensure that you do so as soon as possible.

You must provide an explanation in the ‘return-level’ notepad entry for any unresolved queries. You can find information about notepad entries for COLLECT queries on GOV.UK.

Please make sure you press the ‘submit’ button in COLLECT when you have finished so we can view your returns.

4. Information: providing information about planned 2016 to 2017 study programmes to the national post-16 courses database

The Department for Education expects all post-16 education and training providers funded by EFA to supply information by the end of September 2015, about the courses they plan to offer to 16- to 19-year-olds in 2016 to 2017.

Post-16 providers can now submit course information in one of 3 ways:

1. EFA-funded providers who have DfE Secure Access accounts can access the database by selecting the ‘post-16 portal’ option.
2. SFA or EFA-funded providers who don’t have a Secure Access account can submit course information direct to the National Careers Service Course Directory provider portal.
3. Providers can nominate a third party organisation to input course data on their behalf. More information can be found in the help guide.

Please note that if you already have a provider portal account to upload post-19 course information (for example, if you offer both EFA and SFA-funded programmes), you should continue to access and upload post-16 data using the same account.

Further details can be found on the provider portal.