Increasingly, schools in England are run as if they were businesses, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that some of the worst practices of the corporate sector have infiltrated education. But the real failure lies with government which has established and expanded the corporatisation of our school system since 2010 through its academies and free school programme. 

This has resulted in more than 5,000 schools in England being removed from the oversight formerly provided by their local authority.

The latest sorry saga is the fall from grace of the “superhead” once named by former education secretary Michael Gove as his “favourite headteacher” and who was knighted for his services to education in 2013.

The chief executive of the Education Funding Agency (EFA), Sir Peter Lauener, has sent an excoriating letter to Sir Greg Martin, chair of governors of the Durand Academy Trust (DAT), notifying him of the decision to terminate the trust’s funding agreement following a breathtaking catalogue of breaches of the academy funding agreement and the academies’ financial handbook.

Sir Greg had used his access to public funds and political influence to build an empire of companies whose activities were of sufficient alarm to prompt an investigation by the National Audit Office and the public accounts committee (PAC).

In a bizarre appearance at an evidence session of the PAC in January 2015, which heard about his involvement in companies running leisure services and a dating website, Sir Greg effectively admitted that he had transferred the school from DAT to the Durand Education Trust in order to avoid paying corporation tax.

Accountability of academy trusts

PAC chair Margaret Hodge subsequently wrote to Sir Peter Lauener outlining the PAC’s concerns about DAT and its activities. However, she also highlighted wider issues of oversight and accountability of academy trusts. These included the fact that a lack of effective timely intervention by the Department for Education (DfE) and the EFA and inadequate governance arrangements within Durand Academy had allowed substantial private profit to be made out of public money and created serious conflicts of interest.

The absence of an appropriate fit and proper persons test had allowed directors of academy trusts to develop inappropriate business interests, and the EFA’s ability to spot risks in individual academies and address them properly had been wholly inadequate.

It is the NUT’s view that these failures of oversight persist. We recently witnessed three members of staff at the former Kings Science Academy (KSA) in Bradford, one of the first free schools to open, being jailed for fraud.

There will be many more situations like Durand and KSA unless proper governance and oversight of all state-funded schools is restored.

The NUT believes this is best achieved by giving local authorities the responsibility and powers to oversee all local state schools, allowing them to scrutinise their financial dealings and enabling them to intervene in relation to admissions breaches, exclusions, standards of education and parental concerns. 

Only then can we be confident that we have an education system that is run in the interests of the young people it is there to serve, rather than the financial interests of those who would seek to exploit it.

Kevin Courtney is general secretary of the NUT teaching union

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