New £9m Fund for College Collaboration
The Department for Education (DfE) has launched a new £9 million 12-month national grant programme for all statutory further education (FE) colleges in England.
The College Collaboration Fund (CCF) enables colleges to collaborate and share good practice and expertise to address common quality improvement priorities.
CCF aims to:
Develop greater collaboration between FE colleges, usually, but not exclusively, in the same geographic place
Stimulate quality improvement through developing sector-led approaches peer-to-peer support and sharing good practice
Ensure sustainable FE provision through adopting process which supports high performance
Produce products and approaches to quality improvement that can be adopted by other FE providers
Stimulate the market and provider base to support ongoing quality improvement
Develop a stronger FE offer through improving the quality of FE provision and learner outcomes, including progression to level 3 qualifications
Better meet local and national skills priorities and improve labour market outcomes for learners.
The Fund will run for the financial year 2020 to 2021 and there will be two application rounds.
Statutory FE colleges in England can apply. These are:
General FE colleges
Sixth form colleges (except those in the process of converting to an academy in the 2020 to 2021 financial year)
Designated institutions.
Each application will need a lead college and either a minimum of one other college or a maximum of four other colleges.
To lead a bid, colleges must have either Ofsted grade 1 (outstanding) or grade 2 (good) for overall effectiveness.
A total fund of £9.075 million is available over the two rounds. A minimum of 30% of the total fund will be reserved to support applications in round two.
Applications are invited for grants of a value up to £500,000 with an expected minimum value of £80,000.
Application forms should be submitted by the deadline of 8 April 2020.
The second round of funding is due to open on 15 June 2020.
More information about this funding opportunity and the application process is available on the GRANTfinder funding information platform. GRANTfinder provides up-to-the minute content, insight and analysis on funding news and policy. To find out more about how GRANTfinder can keep you in the know, and subscription fees, contact us today.
