As we approach the end of the academic year, we’d like to share some information with you about our fees and pricing for 2024-25.
As an educational charity, we aim to keep our prices as low as possible for customers. With this in mind, we’re delighted to let you know that for 2024-25, we’ll be freezing the pricing for our Adult Health and Social Care qualifications (at Entry Level – Level 2), and there will also be no immediate increases for our end-point assessment services.
However, with inflation rates averaging 5.2% over the last 12 months we’ll be increasing some of our fees by up to 4%.
View our fees and pricing guide
Our fees and pricing guide for 2024-25 is now available to download. From 1 August, you’ll also be able to view the new individual pricing per qualification on the qualification pages on our website.
What fees are changing?
What fees are staying the same?
End-point assessment (EPA) fees: We’re continuing to review our EPA fees, and any potential changes will be implemented from 1 January 2025 (as in previous years), so you will not experience any uplift on 1 August 2024. We’ll be back in touch with you regarding these fees.
Entry to Level 2 Health and Social Care (Adult) qualifications under SSA2: For Health and Social Care qualifications within our Entry to Level 2 Learning for Work suite, we’ve frozen the price of these qualification fees, and no increases will be applied.
We know from our skills gap report last year that workforce retention continues to be a persistent problem in social care. According to Skills for Care, more than half of the current workforce don’t hold a relevant social care qualification, and of those that do, 2% have a Level 1 and 19% a Level 2. By freezing our qualification fees for this sector, we hope we can support the social care workforce to gain new skills, progress and improve retention.
Late registration fees
We’re introducing a late registration fee from 1 August 2024 for all of our qualifications (with the exception of V Certs and Functional Skills), to ensure we’re able to support learners at every stage of their journey and ensure we have the appropriate resources in place to support you during busy assessment periods. For the products this applies to, if the learner is registered more than 90 days after their start date, a 10% late fee will be applied (which is 10% of the applicable registration and certification fee). As this fee will apply to any new learner registrations with a learner start date of 1 August 2024 onwards, if you have any outstanding learner registrations to make, we recommend that you make these before 1 August 2024.
Please note that for T Level qualifications, late and very late registration fees already were in place and are calculated differently. Please see our fees and pricing document for more information.
Read more information on learner start dates and late registration fees below.
Learner start dates
Last year, we introduced a new mandatory field in the learner registration process on the NCFE Portal to capture learner start dates. This ensures that we can fully support you and your learners at every step of their journey.
The learner start date is the date on which learning for the qualification began (accurate to within a week). For schools and colleges, this would typically be the first day of learning at the beginning of term in September. For private training providers, this could be at any time during the year. Please note that this differs from the registration date, which is the date when the centre makes the learner registration with NCFE on the Portal.
You can find information on how to add learner start dates to the Portal in the registration section of our Portal User Guide.
You can amend this via the ‘my learners’ area of the Portal.
If you have any questions about learner start dates, please get in touch with our Customer Support team.
In recent years we’ve received a significant number of new learner registrations during the busy summer months, often large cohorts of learners are registered and certificated on the same day. To ensure we can best support you during these periods of high demand, we’re applying a late registration fee to the majority of our qualifications, as registering learners later in the year doesn’t enable us to plan effectively for the resources needed during busy times.
We’ve introduced a new mandatory field for all learner registrations in the Portal, learner start date. This is required for all learner registrations going forward. A late registration fee will be applied if you register a learner more than 90 days after the learner start date. For example, if you register a learner on 1 December 2024, but the learner start date is 1 August 2024, the late registration fee would apply as they’ve been registered with us more than 90 days after the learner started on the qualification.
The learner start date is the date on which learning for the qualification began (accurate to within a week). For schools and colleges, this would typically be the first day of learning at the beginning of term in September. For private training providers, this could be at any time during the year. Please note that this differs from the registration date, which is the date when the centre makes the learner registration with NCFE on the Portal.
10% of the registration fee for the product the learner is being registered on will be applied as a late registration fee. This is charged per learner for every learner that is registered late.
The late registration charge will be applicable to all of our qualifications (with the exception of V Certs and Functional Skills, and T Level fees are calculated differently).
The first fees won’t be charged until 30 October 2024 at the earliest, as 1 August 2024 is the earliest a learner start date could occur for this session.
