The UK government announced the £560 million Multiply three-year programme to help transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of adults across the UK.
The programme is being delivered through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. Devon County Council is the Managing Authority for the Multiply across the Devon County Council administrative area.
Devon Multiply is a revenue grant scheme which will support projects to widen maths delivery and to introduce innovative opportunities for improving adults’ functional numeracy skills.
Devon County Council has allocated a maximum of £750,000 for the Devon Multiply grant scheme for October 2022 to March 2023.
We ran a call for expressions of interest between 30 September and 28 October 2022. After assessing the expressions of interest, we identified that care leavers are not targeted as much as anticipated. As such, we have decided to ring-fence approximately £70,000 of the grant funding in year one specifically for those targeting care leavers.
These projects should seek to help care leavers improve their confidence and skills in maths and where this creates a barrier to employment.
Children in care and care leavers are amongst Devon’s most vulnerable adults, both in terms of educational attainment, employment outcomes, and life chances.
Those in a care environment are more likely to be outside of employment, education or training than those not in a care environment, whilst those who have already left care are more likely to be outside of work. Educational attainment of care leavers also trails behind the national average.
We are opening a new call for projects between £5,000 and £15,000 to focus on care leavers and care-experienced individuals aged 19-25.
Operating as a pilot in year one, the grant aims to develop a greater understanding of the specific needs and barriers across this target group. This would allow for approaches to addressing these needs and barriers to be co-designed with target group individuals and representatives.
The pilot will inform potential follow up activity in years two and three, where the programme can be ramped up to further support effective activity.
The term ‘care experienced’ refers to anyone who has been, or is currently in care, or from a looked-after background at any stage in their life, no matter how short, including adopted children who were previously looked after.
A care leaver is an adult who has spent time living in the care system, away from their family. This could be with a foster family, in a children’s home, or supported housing service, or under another arrangement as agreed by their social worker.
We will fund successful projects for an initial period of six months (until 31 March 2023) – this is phase one. Based on performance achieved in phase one and confirmation of year two funding, successful projects will be able to submit a further proposal for scaling up the project in phase two.
Additional funding will be made available for scaling up the projects’ outputs in phase 2 until March 2024.
The overall aim of Devon Multiply is to increase the levels of functional numeracy in the adult population across Devon, particularly within harder-to-reach audiences.
This Devon Multiply call is targeting care leavers and care-experienced individuals. Devon Multiply’s aims include:
All applicants must show how their project will support its target beneficiaries. These beneficiaries could include:
Devon Multiply aims to help people in Devon improve their ability to understand and use maths in daily life, at home, and at work. Whether that be improving household finances, helping children with homework, making more sense of the facts in the media, or improving numeracy skills specific to a line of work.
Applications are invited for innovative proposals that support at least one of the following themes:
Supporting employees to become more effective in their roles through improved maths skills, offering bite-sized courses or interventions directly targeted to support care leavers or care-experienced individuals. This will be delivered by external training providers and/or workplace maths champions.
Supporting pre-employment activity to support entry into employment where maths is a barrier
This theme seeks to reach care leavers or care-experienced individuals who have not traditionally engaged with maths skills often because of previous poor experience, lack of confidence, or lack of opportunity.
It aims to contextualise the provision to meet individual and community needs in a pragmatic way. For example, budgeting, managing debt, engaging with health initiatives and being able to make effective decisions in everyday life.
Building capacity by developing the skills, knowledge, and confidence of care leavers or care-experienced individuals within employers and communities, helping them to become maths champions.
Interventions should not displace, replace or duplicate any existing adult numeracy provision, such as activity funded through the existing Adult Education Budget (AEB) statutory entitlement for maths qualifications.
Examples of project activities could include:
Young individuals within the care system or care experienced will often not achieve their potential if they do not feel supported and understood in an educational environment.
As such, suitable learning approaches to individuals within this target group may differ from learner to learner due to their previous education experiences, needs, and their distinct Education, Health and Care Plan.
Additionally, learners’ individual risk-assessed behaviour plan should be followed to ensure that learners feel safe in their learning environment.
Organisations that are eligible to apply for a grant include:
The adults who are being supported by Devon Multiply must live in the Devon County Council Administrative area: Exeter, Teignbridge, Torridge, North Devon, Mid Devon, South Hams, East Devon, and West Devon.
Devon Multiply projects may be delivered by a consortium of eligible project deliverers. If there is more than one organisation applying to deliver a project, a lead organisation must be selected to become the lead applicant with the remaining organisation(s) acting as delivery partner(s).
In this situation, the applicant would be responsible and liable for the delivery partner(s) and ensuring the project is operating as planned.
As explained in the first part of this guide, the project offers revenue grants.
You can apply for a minimum grant of £5,000 and a maximum grant of £15,000. Within this call of applications, Devon Multiply will fund 100% of the eligible costs of the awarded projects up to a maximum of £15,000.
Eligible revenue costs include:
Points that will often need extra clarification and should be looked at on an individual basis include:
If you are unsure if a cost is eligible, please contact the programme team who will be happy to help. Email devon.multiply@devon.gov.uk.
Costs that are not eligible for Devon Multiply purposes will include (this list is not exhaustive):
All applications must also consider how they will deliver in line with subsidy control (or State Aid for aid in scope of the Northern Ireland Protocol) as per UK government guidance – as well as all other relevant legal obligations such as procurement. This will be tested as part of the appraisal process, and monitored thereafter.
Grants will be paid in arrears and normally in stages dependent on your timescales and outputs/milestones. We expect you to make a maximum of three claims over the course of the project.
You must show that you have sufficient funds to pay for the project costs until you receive the grant payments. In some circumstances you may need to apply for a percentage of the costs upfront, this is an exception rather than the rule.
All projects must be able to deliver, show defrayal and claim all project costs by 31 March 2023.
Defrayal means that any agreed eligible costs must be paid in full. Items can only be declared as fully defrayed if evidence is provided that the payment for the item has left the purchaser’s account.
The Devon Multiply team will assess your application. We are looking for evidence of a sound business case and for projects that deliver value for money and meet our priorities for funding.
When you apply for a grant, you are competing with other applicants in the eligible area. We are looking for projects that best meet the priorities for funding, and that are good value for taxpayers’ money. If you can show this clearly in your application, you are more likely to receive a grant.
Devon Multiply funding is limited and will be prioritised to applications that best contribute to the programme’s aim and themes, as set out above.
This means that even those who submit a quality application may not be funded, as this scheme aims to support a range of projects, to cover a variety of needs, geographies and demographics.
We aim to support projects within those wards and places within the county whose residents have traditionally had the lowest skills achievement.
Devon County Council reserves the right not to make any awards if it is considered that the proposals are not sufficiently innovative, are not scalable, or practical.
All applications are assessed and put forward to an independent decision-making board which has the final decision on whether a project is approved or declined for funding.
Do not start work, incur costs, or place any orders before your grant agreement has been signed. This will potentially make your whole project ineligible.
We are using an application form designed for grants between £20,000 and £250,000. We understand that the application process may appear to be lengthy for those only seeking a small amount of funding, however, the application detail should be proportionate to the size of the grant you are applying for.
The most important consideration, and what your application will be assessed on, is the quality of the information, not quantity. Therefore, we expect the level of detail will be greater for larger project funding applications than smaller projects.
The Devon Multiply grant scheme has a two-stage application process:
The EOI stage is the first step in your application process. This is your opportunity to tell us about your project and explain the benefits and what you are aiming to achieve.
We realise that your project is organic and will develop as you progress through the application. At this stage we need the higher level (or summary) information; we will ask you for more details at the full application stage (if your expression of interest is successful).
Tip: Make sure your answers to the questions are clear and concise. The person reading your application may not know your sector in detail, therefore avoid using acronyms or jargon. Don’t assume we will know of your organisation or what it does.
Ensure you clearly outline your purpose and who your work is directed toward, for example, working specifically with isolated older people or younger adults with mental health issues.
Your EOI must be submitted electronically using our online form or sent to devon.multiply@devon.gov.uk where a hard copy of the EOI form has been requested.
The programme team will review your application and a decision will be made on whether to invite you to submit a full application.
There are three possible outcomes in the EOI stage:
Approved and invited to submit a full application. You will be sent an email inviting you to submit a full application. If we feel there are areas that you could improve on we will provide feedback.
You may also be given conditions that you must meet at the submission of your full application. The email will have a deadline date for submission of your application.
Deferred – if your project is deferred this is because the assessor needs some further information to enable them to make a decision.
We will tell you what we require, and you will have 10 working days to submit the information. Your application will be assessed again and a decision made.
Rejected – you will be sent an email with detailed information on how this decision was made, and areas that could be improved should you wish to reapply.
If you are unable to meet your submission date please get in touch as failure to meet your submission date may result in your invitation to submit a full application being withdrawn.
The full application is a more comprehensive application. This is your opportunity to tell us in detail about your project.
If you have been invited to this stage we believe your project is eligible based on the information provided at the EOI stage and we are interested to find out more.
This is a competitive process and having an invitation to submit a full application does not mean you will be awarded funding. You are part of a group of projects that will be presented to the decision-making board.
Tip: Ensure you make the distinction between what your organisation delivers as a whole and what the discreet project is that you are requesting funding for – even when requesting support for ‘core costs’ you must clearly define what the funding is going towards and what directly it will achieve.
In the full application stage we will require your supporting documents that can include, for example, policies, business accounts and supporting letters.
As well as supporting documentation that demonstrates the need and demand, impact, value for money and deliverability of your project and how it will make a game-changing difference to the local economy or community.
You will need to demonstrate how you have met any conditions stated in your invitation to full application, together with proof of all relevant policies required for your project to proceed.
You might also need to provide quotations or tenders for the project costs.
Outputs are the measurable results that you will achieve as part of the project. Outputs are integral in the decision-making process as they help the appraiser determine the value for money that the project will achieve.
If your application is successful they will form part of the grant funding agreement which you will be required to enter into with Devon County Council. Therefore, it is advisable to be realistic about the outputs your project will achieve.
Some examples of outputs you might achieve could include the number:
Milestones are the key steps in your project – these are normally the timescales in which you hope to achieve progress.
Please check you have included:
If you do not have one or more of these policies please explain which policies you do not have in place and explain why.
The application form must be signed electronically and sent as a PDF or Word document. Preferably a PDF document.
Please send your application from and the supporting documents from the email address you give us in Section 1 of the application form
The programme team will check your application for completeness; if there are any documents missing or we require further information the team will request this from you and give you five working days to submit it.
There are short timescales between submission and the decision-making panel meeting date, therefore we would advise you to submit this information as soon as possible.
All applications will be independently appraised. The appraiser may ask you clarifying questions, therefore, try and ensure you are available between the period of processing and decision making in case the funder has any queries – or provide an alternative contact where you can’t avoid being unavailable.
The decision on whether to award funding will be made by the decision-making board which is comprised of Devon County Council and sector representatives.
There are four possible outcomes from a decision-making board meeting:
The successful applicants (approved projects) will be required to enter into a grant agreement with DCC.
Whilst we appreciate a rejection will be disappointing, this decision will not have been taken lightly, therefore appeals are only accepted if you believe we have:
Appeals cannot be made because you are unhappy with the outcome.
All appeals should be submitted in writing to devon.multiply@devon.gov.uk within 30 working days and they will be independently reviewed.
The outcome will be sent to you within 30 working days of receipt of your appeal and this decision will be final.
If you believe that you have an eligible project idea, please complete an expression of interest form.
If you require a different format or support, please contact the Multiply team at devon.multiply@devon.gov.uk.
Please submit your expression of interest no later than 13 December 2022.
We will acknowledge receipt within 2 days and will inform you of the outcome within 15 days.
For any other queries please contact the Devon Multiply team at devon.multiply@devon.gov.uk.