Uplift fees for early career teachers (ECTs) and mentors are now fixed
We’ve now fixed how uplift fees are shown for early career teachers and mentors.
What’s changed
ECTs and mentors in the 2024 or earlier cohorts, who are at schools eligible for uplifts, will show the following on GET participants:
sparsity_uplift: truepupil_premium_uplift: true
Previously, we had said we would always show mentors as false in the Register ECTs API, but this was incorrect.
Started declarations for these participants will also show as uplift_paid: true when their declaration has been paid. It will stay true if the declaration is later clawed back.
Other declaration types, like retained-1 or completed, will show as uplift_paid: false, as uplifts are only paid for started declarations.
Participants in the 2025 cohort or later will always be shown as:
sparsity_uplift: falsepupil_premium_uplift: false
This is because uplift fees are no longer paid from the 2025 cohort onwards.
If mentors are on a replacement mentor schedule in the 2024 or earlier cohorts, they are also not eligible for uplift payments on their started declarations. However, this is handled manually by DfE through adjustments to financial statements, and they will still appear over the API like other mentors eligible for uplift payments.
Why we’ve made this change
This aims to make it clearer when participants actually have the uplift fees applied, and when they are paid out for declarations.
It also fixes an error we made in the register early career teachers API specification stating that mentors would always show as false for uplift fees.
Impact on lead providers
This should have a minimal impact. In the existing API for the manage training for ECTs service, uplifts were still only paid for started declarations for 2024 and earlier cohort participants.