Audit-ready.
From day one.
The Department for Education requires institutions to maintain detailed records of every bursary decision, the evidence considered, and all payments made. myBursary is built around those requirements - not adapted to them after the fact.
The audit framework, plainly stated.
The 16–19 Bursary Fund is a condition-of-funding grant. The DfE guidance sets out what institutions must record, retain, and be able to produce at audit. The main requirements are:
Written assessment for every award
Each bursary decision must be supported by documented rationale - why the student was eligible and how the amount was determined.
Evidence of eligibility retained
Supporting documents - benefit award notices, bank statements, local authority letters - must be retained for at least six years from the end of the funding year.
Payment records matched to awards
Every payment - whether by BACS, in-kind, or other method - must be recorded and reconcilable to an approved award.
Vulnerable Group register
Institutions must maintain a register of all Vulnerable Group bursary holders, including category, ULN, and amounts paid.
Annual reassessment for discretionary awards
Household income must be re-verified each academic year for students receiving a discretionary bursary.
Built to satisfy each requirement.
Decision rationale logged on every application
Every approval or rejection requires a written rationale from the decision-maker. This is stored permanently against the application - timestamped and attributed to the individual who made the decision.
Evidence stored securely for six years
Supporting documents are held in private, access-controlled storage in UK data centres. Files are encrypted at rest and served via signed URLs that expire after a short period - they are never publicly accessible. Retention is set to satisfy the DfE six-year requirement.
Payment records linked to approved awards
BACS schedules, in-kind payments and expense claims are all recorded against the approved application. Your finance team can export a full payment manifest in a format suitable for reconciliation.
DfE bursary register export ready to submit
The Vulnerable Group register and full cohort bursary register export to Excel in a format that matches DfE claim submission requirements. No reformatting required.
Annual reassessment tracking built in
myBursary tracks reassessment status for each discretionary application and surfaces those due for renewal. Students can self-declare unchanged circumstances, which is recorded as a versioned declaration - satisfying the DfE’s annual verification requirement.
UK GDPR and data controller obligations.
Your institution is the data controller for student bursary data. Senha Ltd (the company behind myBursary) acts as a data processor on your behalf. Our processing activities are set out in the School Agreement, which includes the data processing provisions required under UK GDPR Article 28.
All data is held in UK data centres. We do not transfer personal data outside the UK. Student data is not used for any purpose other than the delivery of the myBursary service.
For full detail on our data handling, see the Privacy Policy and School Agreement.
DfE bursary fund documents.
Official Department for Education guidance, plus our plain-English walkthrough of what a funding assurance review involves.