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College finance teams are working through a familiar kind of late-April: multiple funding announcements arriving, none of them quite settled, with decisions due in May that will shape the rest of the financial year. This week brought guidance on the post-16 National Insurance contributions grant, updated apprenticeship funding rules, and a pay claim from joint unions now queued for its first formal hearing in June. The combination doesn't make for easy planning. The NI Grant

Skills England published the funding rates for all ten apprenticeship units on 21 April, and the earliest starts are 28 April [FE Week]. That's less than a week away. Colleges and training providers that haven't yet looked at the payment model in detail should do it now. Thirty per cent at the milestone. Seventy on completion. Here's the structure. Providers receive 30% of a unit's funding rate when a learner completes 30% of their planned hours. The remaining 70% only arri

Thirty-two thousand more students enrolled in colleges this year than the DfE had a budget for. This week the department confirmed those students remain unfunded. Colleges carry the cost. The growth funding shortfall Wednesday's update says colleges will get 75% of the expected growth payment. That sounds like most of it. It isn't close. David Hughes at the AoC ran the numbers publicly. Fully covering 32,000 extra students costs roughly £220 million. The formula normally d

Date | 10th April 2026 Buried between a capital funding announcement and a rapidly approaching bid deadline, there's a Court of Appeal ruling this week that could quietly reshape how colleges are taxed. Finance directors already know about it. Everyone else should. What Colchester Institute just won Colchester Institute beat HMRC at the Court of Appeal last week in a VAT dispute dating back to a 2008 building project. The court ruled that grant-funded education counts as "bu