Scholarship update from the Department for Education – Friday 5th February 2021

As a result of high demand from teachers and leaders for NPQ scholarships, access to scholarship funding for new applicants was suspended in late July 2020. This scholarship suspension relates to the current suite of NPQs and will remain in place until 31 August 2022.

You will receive funding for the full course fee if you meet certain eligibility criteria and either:

• you started your NPQ course on or before 23 July 2020 or
• your provider confirmed on or before 23 July 2020 that it had reserved a place for you on an NPQ course and you start that course by 31 March 2021

To be eligible for funding, you must be a teacher or school leader working at a school which is located in an opportunity area or in an area defined in Achieving excellence areas as category 5 or 6, or employed at a school which is subject to the oversight of a multi-academy trust or diocese, which also includes other schools in those areas. In addition, you must continue to be employed at an eligible school and finally, you must not have previously been funded to undertake an NPQ course of the same level.

Access to funding remains conditional on successful verification of participants’ registration information against the database of qualified teachers (DQT), so you must ensure that the information supplied to your NPQ provider matches your DQT record. You can check and update your DQT record via the Teaching Regulation Agency.

Please contact Forest Learning Alliance here if you have any questions.

In the event that there is over-subscription for this funding, the DfE reserves its right to prioritise funding using the following criteria (in order of priority):

1. Participants working in Opportunity Areas
2. participants working in schools where more than 30% of pupils receive Free School Meals
3. Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) teachers and leaders
4. Participants working in a school in an Opportunity Area, where the school is below the Key Stage 2 or Key Stage 4 floor standards