As a leader involved in apprenticeships, setting the right compliance culture and processes in your organisation, whilst understanding the risks and how to mitigate them, is essential.
That’s what the Compliance Panda is all about.… It can apply to funding, but equally can apply to quality, performance and the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations.
- Culture – who you are, your transparency of operations and your attitudes to meeting compliance objectives.
- Structure – the architecture of your organisation, the departments, functions and accountabilities
- Education – the skills and awareness of your people within that architecture
- Data – the information you use to operate
Culture
Culture is at the centre of your organisation. It’s the blend of quality, reputation and ethics that represents you. Think about ethics, integrity and transparency and to what extent you promote these in the organisation. How do they feature in your job descriptions and performance monitoring?
Structure
- The departments and job roles you have, how the jobs are designed, the capacity and the resource.
- Product design and lifecycle – the product itself, having it ready for delivery and being assured that it’s composition is compliant and how it’s refreshed.
- Internal or external compliance monitoring.
- Forms and contracts, the templates you use to operate – not just analysing if your forms and contracts are compliant, but looking at the contracts and agreements you have agreed to (like your funding agreement with the ESFA).
Education
- Training and development on systems and process across the business. Not simply how to do it but how to do it well, efficiently, manage time effectively, and be aware of risks.
- Understanding the product – understanding apprenticeships, the individual programmes you work with, their composition, the time necessary to develop.
- Subject knowledge – knowing the current way of working.
- Service recovery – understanding appropriate ways to act when things go wrong.
Data
- Overall performance, accountability and KPIs.
- Departmental performance.
- Individual Performance against KPIs.
- Data analysis – not just looking at whether you have off the job training, but trends within your population of withdrawals, breaks, performance etc.
David Lockhart-Hawkins is SDN’s funding and compliance specialist. If you’ve been on his compliance leaders series, you will have met the panda! He has experience of working with hundreds of high performing apprenticeship organisations over the last twenty years, including some of the UK’s largest, highest quality, specialist and new providers. David provides support with compliance through SDN events and 1-2-1- support and consultancy.
Compliance Events and CPD
SDN’s compliance events don’t simply take you through the detail and help you understand a topic – we help you to move from planning to practice. If you have a group of individuals interested, we can host a bespoke version for your organisation and tailor the content to suit your needs. Take a look at the webinar series’ we have available:
Apprenticeship compliance for your role
This series will help you to:
- Understand the core compliance rules for Apprenticeships
- Understand how they fit into the typical apprentice journey
- Know how funding works and what this means for your role
- Keep an eye out for common errors
- How to mitigate funding risks
Apprenticeship compliance for leaders
We’ll take you through:
- Key compliance principles – How it all should work
- Risk in areas of operation
- Managing the risk of rogue elements within your organisation
- Safeguarding funding through the apprentice journey – the data needed
- The three R’s, Right programme, Right learner, and Right employer
- Compliance strategies
- Common strategic errors
Apprenticeship pricing and costs
This series will help you to:
- Be clear on eligible and ineligible costs and how to identify these
- Measure and take the apprentice’s prior learning into account
- Establish a clear rational for your costs – in particular, the training price and assessment price
- Explore different costing models and options
ILR and data management for apprenticeships
This series will help cover:
- ILR recording expectations, core fields and data needed across the phases of the apprenticeship journey.
- The common errors and how can you design processes to mitigate these.
- What this means for the phases of the apprentice journey, i.e. Pre-entry, entry/sign up, delivery and progression, including your pricing and dealing with changes in circumstance
- The core data reports used to manage compliance risks, including those produced by PDSAT software.
- The sources of data and the key monthly processes needed to meet ESFA requirements.
- The core challenges of each report and the actions you should take.
- How you can use annotations and other information you’ll want to draw on to be effective.
Consultancy and 1-2-1 Support
SDN can provide tailored consultancy to suit your organisations needs. Take a look at some of the funding and compliance areas we can cover:
- Understand ESFA funding, systems and processes
- Set-up effective data, funding and compliance systems
- Sample the quality of your data, reduce errors and avoid claw-back (mock-audits)
- Establish evidence collection systems that helps to drive quality provision
- Design effective Skills Gap Analysis tools and practice
You can also add additional topics to your bespoke consultancy offer, such as quality, safeguarding, curriculum design and more.
If you’d like to discuss how we can support your organisation, please get in touch.