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NPQ funding eligibility checks

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Key points

  • You don’t need to have a valid TRN in order for DfE to pay the provider for your training.
  • Eligibility for funding for NPQs is linked to the establishment you work at, rather than having a TRN.
  • This is where ECF differs from NPQ. ECF is based on some characteristics about the individual (are you a qualified teacher) & some about the establishment (what type of school you belong to). NPQ is only based on what type of establishment you belong to.
  • For NPQs TRNs are only needed to enable people to access their certificates via the TRA teacher self serve portal.
  • Providers are contractually responsible for running checks at the point of application (post-reg). These checks include 1) checking someone’s identity 2) checking they belong to the school / establishment they state that they do on register.

Checking DQT flags

The only caveat is that we should probably be checking for DQT flags during our validation process. This would be to ensure anyone who is banned from teaching is not eligible for funding. It makes sense for us to do this step as we have direct access to that data rather than Providers. This was descoped from MVP due to low numbers of flags in the DQT and that school support /confirmation of the participant working for them is contractually required to happen.

Therefore we should be confident that all NPQ participants, whether they have a validated TRN or not are eligible for funding. Providers should have checked that they belong to the establishment they say they do and we would have determined that their establishment is eligible for funding.

The real questions here are:

  • Are providers carrying out those identity & school checks?
  • Or is it just that they haven’t got any discrepancies to report to us yet?!

‘Ineligible until you confirm’

In NPQ, we use a model with Providers where we confirm ‘eligibility, unless the Provider states otherwise’. This differs from ECF where we state someone is 'ineligible until we have evidence to say should be eligible.

There’s a few legacy decision reasons for this which are:

  • Before the first launch, providers refused to train participants at risk - e.g. train without confirmation of funding eligibility. At the point of launch, this risked a potentially high number of users not being started/trained on an NPQ at all, so we went with the ‘eligible unless you say otherwise’ model.
  • Providers have it explicitly written into their contracts to run identity checks and school-checks, and this is audited. We had this written into the contracts & assurance guidance in order to ensure that there was a much lower risk of fraud and that Providers couldn’t “game” the system to get paid for people that weren’t actually valid.
  • Given the low number of situations like this in previous years (remember npq land has years of data we could look at), we decided the holding pen model ECF uses and the risk of hundreds of people not being trained was not worth the effort or cost.