Teachers and MPs query academy costs

Today the Commons Public Accounts Committee published a report that said in the two years from April 2010 to March 2012, the Department for Education spent £8.3 billion on academies.

“£1 billion of this was an additional cost to the department not originally budgeted for this purpose,” the PAC said.

“Some of this expenditure led to unnecessary extra money being used by the department which was not recovered from local authorities.”

Academies are independent state schools funded directly by central government, directly accountable to the DfE and outside local authority control.

By September 2012 the number of open academies had increased tenfold, from 203 to 2,309.

Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, said:

“The report confirms the concerns that NASUWThas been raising for some time about whether the academy programme is delivering value for money.

“It is clear from the report that the academy programme has expanded too far, too fast and the Department for Education is under-resourced and unable to cope with the Secretary of State's ideological drive to take schools out of local authority control.

“What is also clear is that enormous sums of public money have been used to fund a complex and inefficient programme, resulting in funds being diverted away from other areas, including money that should have been spent on school improvement across all schools.

“There should be no 'secret garden' of funding when public money is involved.”