If an apprentice leaves your salon and moves to a different employer, it is important to take the correct action to prevent the apprentices funding from being suspended.
If an apprentice leaves, you must notify the Head of Centre at the academy they attend as quickly as possible. Once you confirm the apprentice has left, the Head of Centre will inform the Cheynes Training head office team.
Where a change of employer is quicky reported (within 28 days or less), this can be recorded by Cheynes Training (under a continuation in the original learning aim with a new employer).
As the original employer, it is your responsibility to stop funding payments being made to Cheynes Training, we can’t do this for you, it must be done by you through your Apprenticeship Service account. The system requires you to record a ‘stop date’ that corresponds with the date the apprentice changed employer. Failure to record a stop date results in the funding continuing to be recorded under your account and leads to a funding error called a ‘data lock’, and funding for the learner is suspended by the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). This will affect the future funding of the apprentice.
As an example, if an apprentice leaves their employer on (say) 12th January and starts with a new employer on 5th February:
- As the original employer, you must add a February stop date for the apprentice in your apprenticeship service account
- The new employer also needs to select ‘provider permissions’ and give Cheynes Training permission to move the apprentice.
- When Cheynes Training has the right permission, we can move the apprentice to the new employer’s account by creating a ‘change of employer’ request. The new employer needs to approve this in the ‘ready to review’ section within ‘your cohort requests’.
If the date the apprentice left their employment with you (the original employer) or the date the new employer states when the ILR is submitted are incorrect, the ESFA data matching process will cause a data lock error and funding for the apprentice is suspended.
To resolve a data lock error:
- The speediest way is for the original employer to change the stop date to match the start date with the new employer.
- If the original employer does not change the stop date, Cheynes Training must record the change of employer as a withdrawal from programme from the date the apprentices left the original employer (in this case January) and restart the learner with the new employer (in this case February). This penalises Cheynes Training by reducing the training providers overall success rate.
- To change the stop date, the original employer should log into their apprenticeship service account, go to ‘Manage your apprentices’, click on the apprentice’s name and insert the stop date. (if the apprentice leaves the original employer on the last calendar day of the month, the stop date must be added for the next month).
If you have any queries about data-locks, please contact emma@cheynestraining.com