Synergy News & Blog: London Office
Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) 2020-2021 Bid Feedback and Appeals
The 2020/2021 Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) submission feedback is now available for unsuccessful bids and can be accessed by logging into your school’s CIF portal. Schools that were unsuccessful in this year’s round can appeal.
We are expecting the ESFA to publish guidance notes, however, from previous experience we have put together some useful points to consider for your appeal:
- The appeal needs to be on technical grounds only. If the assessor has missed some of the information included in the bid, the appeal needs to highlight this technical error, which if noted, would have increased the score of your bid.
- No new information can be added. Unfortunately, even if the school have since suffered from a major incident relating to the bid issue e.g. flooding, this would not be considered in the appeal. Only the information in the original bid submission will be reassessed. No new documents or evidence can be added.
- The appeal is to be submitted online through your school’s CIF portal. This is a written submission with a very limited word count.
- We anticipate that the appeals will be assessed in September 2020 and we await the ESFA’s confirmation of this.
The CIF bid feedback can help inform applicants of what is required to be successful in future bids. However, as both requirements and scoring can change from year to year, this must be read in conjunction with the new CIF guidance released every year.
If your appeal is unsuccessful, our specialist team at Synergy can help you prepare comprehensive supporting evidence for success in next year’s CIF bid round.
