The Individual Training Account is closed, and nothing has replaced it
An ITA gave people in Scotland up to GBP 200 a year toward a short course. The funding was withdrawn in the 2024/25 Scottish budget, nothing was allocated for 2025/26, and no restart has been announced. Here is what it was, why your searches keep hitting error pages, and what a learner in Scotland can realistically use instead.
ITA funding in Scotland: the position in 2026
The short version is that Individual Training Accounts are gone and there is nothing in their place. The funding was withdrawn in the 2024/25 Scottish budget, no money was allocated for 2025/26, and as of mid 2026 no replacement scheme and no restart date has been announced. Skills Development Scotland's own position is that no funds exist in the SDS budget allocation for the delivery of the ITA scheme. If you have been working through search results and landing on error pages, that is why: the official MyWorldofWork page for the scheme now returns a 404, while blog posts and forum threads from 2023 still describe ITAs in the present tense. The scheme deserves better than a shrug on the way past. An ITA was worth up to GBP 200 a year toward a course from an SDS approved provider, and it was built for short courses, licences, certificates and tickets: the kind of qualification that costs a couple of hundred pounds and changes what you are allowed to do at work. For that job it was genuinely useful, a lot of people in Scotland used it, and losing it was a real loss to them. What it was never meant to be, and never was, is bootcamp money. Set GBP 200 against a course fee of EUR 5,000 to 17,000 and the arithmetic answers itself. We point that out to give you a reason to stop hunting for this particular pot, not to be clever at the expense of a scheme that did what it set out to do. One note on scope, so you know what you are reading. This page assesses exactly one Scottish scheme, the SDS Individual Training Account. It is not a survey of adult skills funding in Scotland, and where we have not researched something we will say so and point you at the people who can answer it, rather than hand you a verdict we cannot stand behind.
You had to be 16 or over and resident in Scotland. Those were the two fixed conditions, and everything below sat on top of them. All of this is written in the past tense deliberately: there is no live application to make in 2026, and no version of these tests you can still pass.
You had to be unemployed, or earning under around GBP 22,000 a year. ITAs were means tested by design. They were aimed at people out of work and people on low incomes, not at every adult in Scotland.
You could not already be in education. If you were in school, college or university, or on another funded training programme, the ITA was not open to you.
The course had to sit on the SDS approved list. The money went toward training delivered by an approved provider on a pre-registered course list, so eligibility was never only a question about the learner. Code Labs Academy was not on that list, and with the scheme closed the point is academic.
None of these tests is being applied today, because nothing is being decided. There is no queue to join, no application to submit and no adviser weighing your case, for the simple reason that SDS has no funds allocated to the scheme. If you remember qualifying a few years ago, there is nothing waiting to be reactivated.
Frequently asked questions
Can I still apply for an ITA in 2026?
No. Individual Training Account funding was withdrawn in the 2024/25 Scottish budget, nothing was allocated for 2025/26, and the position has not changed since. Skills Development Scotland's own wording is that no funds exist in the SDS budget allocation for the delivery of the ITA scheme, and the official MyWorldofWork ITA page has been removed and now returns a 404. There is no application form, no waiting list and no reduced version of the scheme running quietly in the background. If you find a page telling you how to apply, check the date on it.
Is the ITA coming back?
Nobody has said so, and we are not going to guess on your behalf. There is no announced restart date and no announced replacement as of mid 2026. If that changes it will be announced by the Scottish Government and by SDS, and their pages are where it will appear first. What we would gently push back on is putting your plans on hold for it. Even at full strength an ITA was worth up to GBP 200 a year, so it was never going to be the thing that decided whether you could retrain.
Could I have used an ITA at Code Labs Academy anyway?
No, on two counts, and neither is a complaint about the scheme. First, ITAs paid for courses from providers on the SDS approved list, which was a Scottish domestic list. Second, and more decisively, GBP 200 a year does not meaningfully move a fee of EUR 5,000 to 17,000. ITAs were built for short courses, licences and certificates, and within that scope they were a good use of public money. Our German AZAV certification is worth mentioning only to rule it out: it carries no weight in the Scottish system and we are not going to suggest otherwise.
I keep seeing free government funded bootcamps. Why can I not get one?
Because almost all of those results are Skills Bootcamps, and Skills Bootcamps are an England programme with residency in England as a condition of eligibility. You can read what the scheme is on our Skills Bootcamps in England page, but read it as background rather than as an option: a Scottish resident cannot take a place on one. It is worth knowing this early, because a lot of people in Scotland spend weeks applying into a scheme that was never open to them.
What if I ask my employer and they say no?
Ask for the reason in one sentence, because the common ones have different answers. If it is budget timing, ask to be written into the next planning cycle and pick a later intake, since we run several a year. If it is worry about you leaving afterwards, a written training agreement with a pro-rata repayment clause is normal practice and often the thing that makes a yes possible. If it is relevance, come back with the module list mapped against your team's actual work. And if the answer stays no, the course is still reachable without them: interest-free monthly instalments of up to 60 payments made directly to Code Labs Academy, the discount for paying upfront, or one of our shorter self-paced courses if the full bootcamp fee is out of range this year.
Does an online or foreign provider count for training funding in Scotland?
It depends entirely on whose money it is, and the honest answer splits in two. For public funding, provider conditions are the norm: the ITA ran on an SDS approved provider list, and other Scottish routes have their own rules that we have not researched, so ask SDS or your college rather than assuming either way. For private money the picture reverses completely. A UK employer can buy training from any supplier anywhere with no accreditation gate at all, work related training is normally tax free for the employee and deductible for the company, and that is why employer funding is the route we point Scottish learners at first. If you are self-employed, training costs connected to your existing trade may also be deductible, and your accountant can confirm that for your situation.
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