Recommendation 15

We asked why multi-academy trusts had more freedom in how they distributed funding. The Department replied that academy trusts and local authorities had different roles: local authorities were responsible for distributing funding between schools, whereas academy trusts had direct responsibility for the provision of education in the schools that they ran. The Department explained that there were some circumstances, particularly where an academy trust had taken on a challenging school, where the trust might pool funding in order to do things across the academy chain that had benefits for all the schools but might, for a period, help one school more than another.21