Department For Culture Media Sport
Summary of grant funding
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), jointly with the Department of Education, intends to provide a circa 2.7 million grant to an organisation or consortium of organisations to act as a delivery partner for the Enrichment Partnerships Pilot (EPP).
The pilot aims to test a system change approach to improve the enrichment offer in up to 200 secondary schools located in Education Investment Areas.
The final selection of a delivery partner will be made by a panel appointed by DCMS, using the assessment criteria set out in the Assessment section.
The deadline for applications is 23:59 Monday 4 September 2023.
Purpose
Fund overview
Enrichment programmes encompass a wide range of activities, including sports, art, drama, outdoor experiences, debating, volunteering, business, tech or cooking. Those activities can have a significant positive impact on young people, including on their academic progress and wellbeing. Many schools would like to do more to support these activities, but face barriers such as limited staff time, low pupil engagement and difficulty connecting with local partners who could support delivery.
The government previously delivered the 21 million Essential Life Skills (ELS) Programme (2018 to 19) to increase extracurricular activities through primary and secondary schools in 12 Opportunity Areas. Findings from that programme highlighted that enrichment offers would benefit from engaging young people in co-design, harnessing local provision and coordinating across clusters of schools. Enrichment offers should include a wide range of activities and address practical barriers (e.g. cost) and social barriers to participation (low confidence, negative perceptions).
The Enrichment Partnerships Pilot aims to improve the enrichment offer of up to 200 secondary schools in Education Investment Areas. The Pilot will identify and fund a small number of staff in local organisations, including local authorities, voluntary and community sector organisations or multi-academy trusts, to provide bespoke support to secondary schools in their respective local areas to:
- co-design the enrichment offer, aligned with local needs
- develop local partnerships to deliver enrichment activities as part of the designed offer
- facilitate collaboration between schools to offer an enhanced enrichment offer
- identify efficiencies across schools and access additional funding streams and support
- upskill school staff, ensuring long-term sustainability
The project aims to test whether greater coordination locally can enhance school enrichment offers and remove barriers to participation, create efficiencies (reducing the burden on school staff resources) and unlock existing funding and provision.
Fund objectives
Objectives of this pilot project to be achieved by March 2025 are:
Test whether providing centralised organisational support to clusters of secondary schools via local organisations (including local authorities, voluntary and community sector organisations and/or multi-academy trusts) enables secondary schools to offer a more varied and high-quality enrichment programme, creates efficiencies in school spending and upskills school staff.
Provide support to up to 200 mainstream secondary schools in Education Investment Areas to improve their enrichment programme.
Increase uptake of enrichment activities within participating schools between September 2024 to March 2025.
All participating schools report either no change or a reduction in the financial and organisational costs of delivering enrichment programmes.
Delivery partner role
DCMS is seeking to appoint a delivery partner to deliver this pilot a single organisation or joint delivery body with:
- knowledge of the education system and enrichment activities
- experience in grant making and local partnership building
The value of this grant is approximately 2.7 million (inclusive of irreclaimable VAT) until March 2025. This is inclusive of costs for the delivery partner to deliver the pilot. We anticipate the majority of this will be used for onward grants, primarily for staffing, through a limited competition to local organisations in Education Investment Areas, with the capability and interest to deliver the pilot.
The delivery partner will:
- identify and provide grants to local organisations in 15 to 20 localities, such as local authorities, voluntary and community sector organisations and multi-academy trusts to deliver the pilot, working with clusters of circa 10 secondary schools in each.
- support the local organisations, which could include (but is not exhaustive):
- providing expertise of partnership development
- facilitating youth engagement
- encouraging sharing best practice
- providing template documents
- provide regular reports to DCMS on delivery progress
- support the evaluation partner with the evaluation of the pilot, including through collection of monitoring data and working with grant recipients
- produce a toolkit aimed at local organisations to support sustainable engagement with schools, to be revised following pilot learnings
Geographical limit
The Enrichment Partnerships Pilot aims to improve the enrichment offer of up to 200 secondary schools in Education Investment Areas (EIA).
The Levelling Up white paper identified 55 EIA. These are the third of Local Authorities in England where educational outcomes were the weakest based on sustained low performance across key stage 2 and key stage 4 in 2017 to 2019.
Timetable for pilot delivery
Due to the need for the full circa 2.7 million of funding to be delivered by the end of the 2024/25 financial year, delivery at pace is critical, and the provisional timetable for delivery of the pilot reflects this.
Organisation eligibility
Applicants may apply as a single organisation with or without partners, or may alternatively submit a joint application (for example, as a consortium, joint venture, unincorporated association, partnership or otherwise). This may, for example, apply to entities who feel that alone they do not have the capacity or capability to address the departments requirements, or wish to bring in additional expertise to meet the departments required skills and experience for this role. Applicants are responsible for determining the most appropriate approach to delivering their proposal.
Delivery partner requirements:
Experience of working with local authorities, voluntary and community sector organisations and/or schools, including multi-academy trusts
Sufficient staff capacity and capabilities to deliver this project in the timeframe set out
Experience of grant management of a similar monetary value (circa 2.5 million) strong financial management processes, such as fraud risk assessments, fraud, bribery and corruption due diligence, and experience managing counter-fraud processes
Experience of local partnership development
Knowledge of the education system and enrichment programmes
Experience of working with young people and incorporating youth voices into the development of projects or programmes
Experience of working with research organisations to deliver robust evaluations including collecting and sharing of data from grant recipients
Your organisation (or joint delivery body) will also need to pass our due diligence checks:
The grant award does not exceed 50% of your annual income, as an example: if an organisation applied for a 500,000 grant, the collective annual turnover needs to be 1,000,000 or more in order that the grant is not more than 50% of the annual turnover/income.
We have received and reviewed at least 2 references
If you have been funded by another part of government, we seek feedback from that department
Trustees are not related and there is no indication of fraud
Where multiple organisations are located at the same postcode, there is no indication of fraud if you do have the same postcode as other organisations you will be asked to provide an explanation
You are able to provide an annual report and audited or certified accounts, covering the last 2 years or similar documentation. Please note: in the event your last financial year end was more than 6 months ago we may request further accounting informati
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