We touched on changes to some tasks in an earlier update about incorporating involuntary conversions.
Here we'll focus on the changes made to the grant and funding task.
Grants for voluntary conversions
In a voluntary conversion, where a school applies to become an academy and join or trust, each school is eligible for a £25,000 conversion grant.
This is used to cover the costs of converting. If there is anything left after the conversion costs have been paid for, the remainder can be used to fund school improvements.
Caseworkers and delivery officers working on these projects need to:
- check the school has completed the grant claim form
- make sure the school or trust has a vendor account
- send the correct information to the Grant payments team
- tell the school the grant application has been sent to the payments team
They may also keep the school up to date about expected payment dates and other useful information.
It's a relatively simple process. Users just have to process 1 type of grant: the conversion grant.
Grants for involuntary conversions
The funding process for schools going through an involuntary conversion is a little more complicated.
An involuntary conversion happens when a school is given an Ofsted inspection rating of inadequate.
Often, that can make for a more challenging stakeholder relationship between the Department for Education and the school.
In most cases, the delivery officer will interact with a representative of the trust the school has been paired with, rather than a person from the school that's converting.
For involuntary conversions, any grants are paid to the trust, rather than to the school.
There is also additional money available to help the school convert and improve.
Types of grants available to involuntary converters
Each trust gets £25,000 to cover the costs of converting the school to an academy.
However, that is included in a larger pot of money that a trust sponsoring a school conversion can get.
This larger amount is a called the Sponsored support grant, and there are different levels or support the trust can receive.
Those levels of grant are known as:
- fast track
- intermediate
- full sponsored
In most cases, the sponsor is entitled to the Fast track grant.
Fast track grant amounts
- £70,000 for primary and special schools
- £80,000 for secondary and all-through schools
In some circumstances, the sponsor might be entitled to a larger grant.
This would be the Intermediate grant, or the Full sponsored grant.
Intermediate grant amounts
- £90,000 for primary and special schools
- £115,000 for secondary and all-through schools
Full sponsored grant amounts
- £110,000 for primary and special schools
- £150,000 secondary and all-through schools
What a delivery officers does differently in an involuntary conversion
Delivery officers working on an involuntary conversions have to:
- check and confirm what type of grant the trust eligible for
- work with the trust to understand how much money they require to convert the school and are entitled to
- check the trust has completed the support grant claim form
- send the correct information to the Grant payments team
- tell the trust the grant application has been sent to the payments team
They may also keep the school up to date about expected payment dates and other useful information.
We've updated the task actions and guidance to reflect these differences.
Other grants and sources of funding
There are other grants and funding a sponsoring trust can receive to help the school and academy. These include:
- additional provision funding
- environmental improvement grant
There are different processes to follow to secure that funding. We need to learn more about these.
We've deliberately left them out of the Process the Sponsored support grant task in order to keep the task actions and guidance focussed and clear.