43. Academy trusts are directly funded by, and accountable to, the Department for Education via the Education and Skills Funding Agency and received £20 billion of Departmental funding in 2017-18.57 As of January 2018, there were around 7,500 academy schools, teaching an estimated 47% of all pupils in England.58
44. We found that the Department's focus on converting large numbers of schools to academies quickly was at the expense of rigorous due diligence checks and risk assessment.59 The Department is statutorily required to direct all maintained schools that Ofsted has rated as inadequate to become academies, with the support of a sponsor.60 Most sponsors, which the Department approves, are groups of schools which have formed to multi-academy trusts.61 The larger the size of the multi-academy trust the greater the impact of any failure.
45. A number of academies have failed.62 I highlighted the appalling example of Whitehaven Academy, run by multi-academy trust sponsor, Bright Tribe in last year's annual report. The school went into special measures.63 The strength and determination of the Whitehaven Academy parents, and the evidence they provided to the Committee, helped us to hold the Department to account. We heard that parents of pupils at the Whitehaven Academy had to put in freedom of information requests to get important information from the trust running the Whitehaven Academy about what was being done to repair the poor state of the building.64 This lack of transparency is worrying. It is not acceptable that parents and local people are having to fight to get information about their children's schools. The Department admitted to us, in October 2018, that children and parents at the Whitehaven Academy had been let down by the most senior levels in the Department.65
46. The Department's governance and oversight of some of the recent changes to the delivery of educational services have fallen short, letting down children and young people. We found that this extends to include the development of the higher education market; intended to increase competition and choice and improve access.66 We concluded that the market is not working in the interests of students or taxpayers. It set up a new regulator to deliver these changes, yet neither the Department nor the regulator were able to assure us of what value for money means in higher education, or how they will monitor and improve it.67
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57 Committee of Public Accounts, Academy accounts and performance, Seventy-Third Report of Session 2017-19, HC 1597, 23 January 2019, para 1, p 4
58 Ibid, para 2, p 9
59 Committee of Public Accounts, Converting schools to academies, Fifty-Second Report of Session 2017-19, HC 697, 11 July 2018, conclusion 1, p 5
60 Ibid, conclusion 2, p 5
61 Ibid, introduction, p 4
62 Ibid, para 4, p 8
63 Committee of Public Accounts, Third Annual Report of the Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts, Second Special Report of Session 2017-19, HC 1399, 5 July 2018, p 15
64 Committee of Public Accounts, Oral evidence: Academy accounts and performance, HC 1597, 19 November 2019, Q 187
65 Committee of Public Accounts, Oral evidence: Converting Schools to Academies, HC 697, 16 May 2018, Qq 64, 65
66 Committee of Public Accounts, The higher education market, Forty-Fifth Report of Session 2017-19, HC 693, 15 June 2018, summary, p 4
67 Ibid, conclusion 1, p 5 and para 3, p 8