February 1, 2018
If your school received more than £40,000 of Collaborative Fund or School Direct (salaried) grant funding from NCTL, the deadline for completing and returning your Annex G certificate of expenditure was Friday 26 January 2018. If you have not already returned yours, please send it as a matter of urgency to annexg.funding@education.gov.uk. This requirement is to provide assurance on grant spending for the 2016 to 2017 financial year.
If you are having difficulty in completing your return, please contact us at annexg.funding@education.gov.uk.
Our Primary Lead School for SD had less than the £40k in salaried grants, but due to other payments as a TSA still had to complete the Annex G and have it audited.
This year the process was far more intense and took up a lot of both our time, that of school staff and the auditors who will charge a higher fee for their extra time.
The audit requires access to trainees’ personal information that even the DfE do not ask for in the Annex, so under Data Protection legislation cannot be provided, but is required to complete the audit.
This could all be avoided if the DfE just paid the grant directly to the Provider, as we have all other trainee records and finances (in most cases totaling hundreds of thousands if not millions in large institutions) inspected annually anyway.
Our Lead Schools do not want the grant and do not want to pass monies on to other schools, so they give 100% of it to us (we’ve only ever had 1 salaried trainee actually employed in a Lead School) so that we can pass it on to the schools with a trainee, along with all other termly payments as set out in our Partnership Agreement.
With the decline in demand for salaried, our Primary grants will total just £9k this year, but other grants will probably still take the school’s total over £40k, so they will need to have it audited again next year for just one trainee.
The DfE should rethink who it pays grants to and just include this nominal amount in with Providers’ account audit.
All this system does is provide extra income to firms of auditors, paid for by money which should be being spent in our schools.