National Audit Office | Schools Week

Funding formula like ‘Robin Hood in reverse’ as NAO finds cash shifted from poorer areas

The government’s flagship national school funding formula has shifted cash from deprived schools to their more affluent counterparts, sparking warnings ministers are “taking from the poor and giving to the rich”. The National Audit Office today found the national funding formula, introduced in 2018, has contributed to a “shift in the balance of funding” from […]

Spending watchdog opens inquiry into national free school meal voucher fiasco

The public spending watchdog is to investigate the government’s free school meals voucher scheme following wide-ranging problems that left parents and children to go hungry. The National Audit Office said the investigation will “set out the facts” about the voucher scheme, including probing the Department for Education’s “objectives and choice of contractor to run the […]

DfE doesn’t check whether academy leaders are ‘fit and proper’

Academy trustees and senior leaders are not being properly vetted for their suitability to run schools, the government’s spending watchdog has warned. Labour MP Meg Hillier, the chair of the powerful public accounts committee said she was “concerned” by the latest report from the National Audit Office, which found that people taking senior jobs at […]

National Audit Office academies report: The key findings

The system used by the government to convert local authority-maintained schools into academies is under National Audit Office scrutiny. The government spending watchdog has published a report looking at the progress of the academies programme, in the context of recent moves to increase the number of academies across England. In the March 2016 white paper […]

Public accounts committee chair slams ‘exorbitantly expensive’ PFI contracts

The chair of the parliamentary public accounts committee Meg Hillier has spoken out against costly private finance initiative contracts and warned that the scheme’s relaunch as PF2 is little more than a rebrand. “Many local bodies are now shackled to inflexible PFI contracts that are exorbitantly expensive to change,” she said, reflecting the situation faced […]