Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to improve financial transparancy in academy trusts.

The department requires a high level of transparency of academy trusts. All academy trusts must have an annual independent audit of their annual accounts by a registered statutory auditor and academy trusts must be open and transparent and publish their accounts. This is not a requirement of local authority maintained schools.

Academy trusts must prepare annual accounts. This provides considerably more information than other schools and provides a far higher level of public scrutiny than is required of local authority schools. Their financial performance is instead summarised within the authorities’ accounts. In addition, academy trusts are audited externally to international auditing standards, again this is not required of local authority schools.

The department also publishes the ‘Consolidated Annual Report and Accounts’, based on returns from all academies in England. The reports are available for public scrutiny at GOV.UK. The most recent report covering 2015/16 is available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/academies-consolidated-annual-report-and-accounts-2015-to-2016. We aim to publish the report for 2016/17 in October.