Academies system is “open to abuse,” the Education Secretary once said

Gillian Keegan, the current Secretary of State for Education, once warned that the academies system is “open to abuse,” and that the nature of its set-up “encourages [individuals] to make money out of it” but with this profit being “hidden in a cost”.

In comments of which Education Uncovered has just been reminded, Ms Keegan, then a backbench MP, issued a series of warnings about the academies policy in 2018 while she was a member of the cross-party House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

Arrangements in academy trusts had, in her limited experience at the time, always been “dodgy,” with very limited protections for those affected if they went wrong, the MP had said.

Although there has been some tightening of the system around contracting since the comments were made, the intervention seems to raise questions as to whether the Department for Education which Ms Keegan leads is doing enough to prevent “abuse”.

The detail

Ms Keegan’s comments came in a session of the PAC on January 29^th, 2018, as the committee investigated academies’ finances, and with this section of the discussion centring on related party contracts.