The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)
Following publication of the annual skills investment statement for the 2012-13 academic year by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills on 1 December 2011, the Skills Funding Agency issued 1,030 initial funding allocation statements, announcing recurrent funding allocations to FE colleges and other skills providers in England, on 16 December.
The allocations in question total £2.3 billion, which includes the largest ever allocation of funding to support apprenticeships.
Some providers will be able to access additional funds not included in the initial funding statement. These include initial additional learner support and discretionary learner support allocations, which will be issued on 27 January 2012. Initial 16 to 18 apprenticeships programme allocations and adult safeguarded allocations have also still to be issued.
Final funding statements for all budget lines for 2012-13 will be issued on 30 March 2012.
The Skills Funding Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency will monitor the impact of funding allocations.
Capital funding allocations for the £100 million two-year FE college capital investment programme, which I announced in August 2011, were confirmed by the Skills Funding Agency on 21 December.
All FE colleges in England were eligible to apply for capital renewal grant funding, which they could spend on urgent capital works, or on the fees associated with developing enhanced renewal grant applications.
A total of 244 FE colleges across England were each successful in securing up to £100,000 in renewal grant funding. In addition, 46 of these were also successful in securing enhanced renewal grant funding of around £1.9 million, taking their total grant funding up to £2 million.
A further 19 colleges met the required quality thresholds but could not be funded on this occasion. I have asked officials of the Skills Funding Agency to continue to work with the colleges concerned to consider how these projects might be helped to proceed.
This latest programme builds upon the Government’s previous FE capital investments, including the £50 million college capital investment programme which provided 154 eligible colleges with a renewal grant of up to £225,000 each. Of these, 21 also secured enhanced renewal grant funding of up to £775,000 taking their total funding to £1 million.
The programme also builds upon the additional £25 million that we made available to 239 eligible FE colleges through the capital works grant.
The grand total of Government’s capital investment through these programmes of £175 million is expected to leverage over £525 million in total project funding.