By Vivienne Russell | 20 July 2012
Head teachers have welcomed the publication of spending data for academies but called for it to be made comparable with funding for maintained schools.
The Department for Education yesterday issued spending statistics for academies in England for the 2010/11 academic year. It covers 186 individual schools and 29 federations, which themselves cover a further 133 schools.
Details on government grants, donations and start-up costs are given along with figures for staffing, administration, maintenance, cleaning and catering costs. Some capital funding figures are also included. The DfE said it wanted to help schools understand whether or not they are providing value for money as well as making data more accessible to the general public.
Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said publication of the academy spending figures was a ‘step in the right direction’ towards better transparency about school funding.
But he added: ‘The data is far from complete and will need refining so that is can be used as a fair comparison of funding of local authority maintained schools and academies. We want to see the data published in a form which helps all school leaders to benchmark how they spend public money and deploy it in the most cost-effective way.’
Lightman said the government should also publish funding information about free schools. The public needed to be reassured that school funding was being targeted at areas where it was most needed, he said.
In the accompanying notes, the DfE said the data was not directly comparable with that collected for local authority maintained schools. This was because academies receive additional funding to carry out responsibilities which are otherwise the preserve of the local authority.
It added that academies tend to be located in areas of high deprivation ‘and so will have received additional funding to reflect this’. Extra grants received from sponsors and the inclusion of capital funding ‘will make some academies’ income appear very high’. Capital income is excluded from the spending data published for maintained schools.
The DfE said that ‘over time’ it hoped to align the datasets for academies and maintained schools. ‘However, we want to avoid duplication of work and unnecessary bureaucracy for all schools and are considering how to achieve this.’
