ESFA’s student financial support scheme guides set out the funding rules for the different schemes. ESFA review and update them annually and they have recently published the guides for the 2024 to 2025 academic year for:
Review the updated guides and remind yourself of the funding rules which apply to each scheme to ensure that you understand them, and that your processes and documentation comply with them, including audit requirements. For the Bursary Fund, ESFA would like to highlight 2 key points:
- You must assess the needs of all individual students when you award funding. This means you must award each student support based on their actual participation needs, not make flat or fixed rate payments to students that do not reflect the actual costs they face.
- You cannot carry forward bursary funding for more than one year. For the academic year 2024 to 2025, that means you must tell us the total amount of any unspent funds (not previously reported) from any year up to and including the 2022 to 2023 academic year.
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