Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the financial returns from multi-academy trusts to the Education and Skills Funding Agency are available for scrutiny.

Multi-academy trusts are regulated by the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) and must sign funding agreements, adhering to clear rules about oversight and compliance. They must also have their annual accounts externally audited and must publish these at Companies House. Given that academy trusts must prepare annual accounts, this provides considerably more information than other schools. The most recently published financial audit identified that more than 95% of trusts had no issues.

These accounts provide a far higher level of public scrutiny than is required of local authority (LA) schools. This is because LA schools are not required to prepare individual statutory accounts and instead, their financial performance is summarised within LAs’ accounts. In addition, academy trusts are audited externally to international auditing standards. This is not required of LA 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, where the most recent attached report can be found at:

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