Apprentice Funding Assistant (AFA) is an organisation to recruit and support a national network of employer based accredited training centres delivering work-based apprenticeships to a common standard with a lifelong employment outcome. The purpose of AFA is to be a single point of contact for a network of small, independent, employer-based academies accredited with City and Guilds (C&G) delivering work-based apprenticeships (initially in hairdressing). AFA will control quality assurance at all levels of the network by effective utilisation of a web-based infrastructure. It is a contractual requirement of all AFA’s academies (called Network Members) that all compliance related information is held on line in the Academy Management System (AMS). This is so as to mitigate the key risk identified: rogue academies jeopardising the relationship between AFA and the source of funding. AFA wishes to be the single point of funding for the network.