2025–26 historical guidance. This is what DfE published for 2025–26 and it may have been superseded. Read the current FRM30
Students with more than 40 planned hours a week
A funding monitoring report identifies records and patterns that DfE wants providers to investigate and be able to explain. Appearing on one does not by itself mean a record is wrong. Many flagged records are correct and simply need their evidence produced; others turn out to need a correction.
Where this comes from
Every word below is DfE’s own, read from the published guidance on 19 September 2026. Nothing in this section was written by FEFunding.
Summary
While there is no minimum number of hours that a study programme must have, no student’s planned hours must exceed 40 hours per week. Study programme planned hours reflect the hours planned for the academic year whereas T Level planned hours are recorded for the length of the T Level programme.
Funding streams reviewed
- 16 to 19 study programmes
- T Levels
What you need to do
You must adjust the planned learning hours to ensure that the student is not studying more than 40 hours per week and both the study programme’s planned hours and dates reflect this. Planned learning hours must be realistic and deliverable and supported by auditable evidence that the activity is timetabled and exists. When students as successfully completing their study programme significantly earlier than the planned end date, you must reduce the planned hours as appropriate to the actual period of attendance. When a student withdraws from one or more aims within the first 6 weeks of a programme, you must remove all of the planned hours for the aim from the total planned hours, unless excluding the hours already delivered within the first 6 weeks would make a material difference to the student’s funding band. In those cases, you can include the hours already delivered in the planned hours.
What we will do
We may contact you in-year to ensure data is reported accurately.
Changes from previous funding year
None
What this means in practice
The Academy does not yet have an explanation of FRM30 that it stands behind, so it is showing you DfE’s wording and nothing of its own. We would rather say that than publish a paragraph nobody has checked against the guidance above. Ask about your specific situation or tell us this is missing.
Funding streams this report reviews
FRM30 in other funding years
Working through it in your own system
- Read the official wording for this report and note exactly which records it identifies.
- Find those records in your own data using the fields the report names.
- For each one, decide whether the record is correct and simply needs its evidence produced, or genuinely wrong.
- Trace a wrong record back to the entry in your source system that produced it, rather than to the file it appeared in.
- Correct it at that entry, regenerate and resubmit.
- Keep the evidence and the reason for the change together, so the record is explainable at audit.
The Academy has no verified supplier guidance for this report yet. Menu locations differ between product versions and between colleges on the same version, so we do not publish navigation we have not confirmed. The steps above are what has to be true in the data, which is the same in every system.
If the record does turn out to be wrong. Correct the record in the system where the data is entered, then regenerate the ILR file and resubmit it. Editing the generated file directly removes the symptom and leaves the cause in place, so the same record returns at the next submission with nobody expecting it. Keep a note of what was changed and why: that note is what makes the correction explainable later.