ACE ANNOUNCEMENT – 23rd May 2025 

We’re pleased to share with you that this afternoon we’ve received confirmation of funding from the Department for Education for the Music Hub programme.   This programme will receive standstill funding for the remainder of the financial year 2025-2026 – from September 2025 to the end of March 2026.

We’ll issue the draft supporting documents soon. We’d planned to share these before the May half term, but we’ve had to push this back to after the break due to this delay.

We will need to wait to receive the specific allocations for each Music Hub – as soon as we have them, we’ll share them with you.

I hope it’s useful to also take this opportunity to confirm the improvements we’ve made to our process. These are based on Hubs’ feedback, and aim to help ease the administrative burden for this coming year’s funding:

• We won’t ask you to submit a full, updated Local Plan as a payment condition during 2025-26, and we don’t expect all of it to be in place for September 2025
• We’ll make five payments instead of six. For stability, there will still be payments in September, November, January, April and June. But the March payment you received this year has been absorbed into the January payment for 2025-26, so you’ll receive 25% rather than 16.67% of your total allocation in January 2026

Funding from April 2026 onwards is subject to the ongoing Spending Review.