Government still footing the bill for failed Bright Tribe chain and sister trust, four years after closure, DfE report reveals

Disclosures in DfE documents also reveal extra payments of £3m over four years in relation to three free schools in England's South West.

 

The government was still paying the bill for one of England’s highest-profile academy trust failures – four years after the last of its schools were transferred to other organisations.

Bright Tribe Trust, which featured in a BBC Panorama documentary in 2018 in which it was accused of misusing government funds and which lost all its schools in 2018-19, nevertheless received £84,644 from the Department for Education in 2022-23.

Meanwhile, its sister chain Adventure Learning Academy Trust (ALAT), which lost its schools in 2019, received £34,960 in 2022-23, a recently-released DfE report discloses.

An annexe to the DfE’s Academy Schools Sector report for 2022-23 sets out costs of policy failure which also include bills for some closed free schools – as well as a £1.9 million transfer to another academy trust which has featured extensively on Education Uncovered, and which took the total extra taxpayer support for three free schools it took over to £3 million over four years.

The detail

Bright Tribe was a prominent failure of the academies scene, having faced intense controversy from 2016, when an investigation I co-wrote for the Observer revealed concerns about related party contracts involving the Stockport-based trust.

By November 2018, it was announced that the trust was to lose all its schools, which had been spread across Suffolk, Essex, Sunderland and Cumbria, during that academic year. Meanwhile, sister chain ALAT, which had been running schools in Cornwall, was to see them transferred to other schools in April 2019.

Yet the two trusts have still each filed four sets of annual accounts at Companies House since losing their schools in 2018-19, and the DfE’s latest document shows that the cost to the taxpayer has been continuing, at least until 2022-23 and quite possibly beyond.

Julie Rayson, a parent from Whitehaven, whose son attended Bright Tribe’s Whitehaven Academy in Cumbria and who led attempts there to hold the trust to account, has forwarded emails she had received in 2021 in which a trustee had asked for information as he sought to dissolve the trust.

However, it does not appear from the Companies House record that the trust has yet been dissolved. Its own accounts for 2022-23, the latest published on Companies House, state that the government “will continue to provide funding for reasonable operational costs to allow the orderly winding down of the trust”.

The accounts state that, during 2022-23, Bright Tribe had total income of £49,126, although it is unclear why this is less than the £84,644 reported as having been paid to it by the DfE. It was owed £11,458 but owed £27,350, the accounts state.

ALAT’s 2022-23 accounts state that it had an income of £18,265 that year, with £50,000 of net debt.

I asked the DfE what Bright Tribe’s 2022-23 grant had been paid for, when these payments would stop, and when the trust would be completely closed down.

The DfE sent a statement which did not directly address the issue, other than to say: “The £84,644 paid to Bright Tribe Trust in 2022/23 was for costs associated with the ongoing wind up of the trust and ensuring the trust remained in a solvent position through to closure.”

I asked if the DfE could say whether any money had been paid to Bright Tribe since 2022-23 and if so, how much, but it said I would need to put in a freedom of information request “for that level of detail”. There was no denial that money had been spent since 2022-23.

The Annex sets out 51 special transfers of funds from the DfE to academy trusts and, in one case, a local authority in Kent County Council. Together, these payments came to £16.3 million, of which £13.5m was in the form of grants not needing to be paid back, and £2.8m was in the form of “repayable” loans.

The disclosures show money being paid in some cases to schools and colleges which had opened under the free schools programme but which were to close.

For example, £191,403 was paid to Langdale Free School, in Blackpool, which closed in August 2023. Similarly, Sir Simon Milton University Technical College (UTC), in Westminster, which closed in August 2022, nevertheless received £82,000 in the year following its closure.

Seckford Education Trust, which was to close in September 2024, was revealed in this document to have received a £755,000 “short-term advance” during 2022-23. It is not clear from the document whether this was repaid.

Avanti Schools Trust

Meanwhile, mystery surrounds the largest grant which appeared on this list: the £1.9 million paid outright that year to the Avanti Schools Trust.

Avanti will be well-known to long-time readers of Education Uncovered, in connection with its takeover of three former Steiner-ethos free schools in the West Country back in 2019.

The DfE’s spreadsheet states that the payment was for “Building Financial Capacity” within Avanti, but otherwise there were no details. So I asked the DfE, and received confirmation that this was related to the three former Steiner schools.

It said: “Avanti Schools Trust was provided [with] a financial support package to address the continued vulnerability of the three former Steiner Free Schools on their transfer into Avanti, and provides operational support in developing a long-term solution to the viability and sustainability of the schools.

“The three inadequate schools (with special measures) [which the DfE had allowed to be set up] transferred to the [Avanti] trust in November 2019. Two of the schools are now rated Good by Ofsted and the other is rated as Requires Improvement.”

However, further investigation reveals that the DfE’s support for the schools ran into several million pounds over the period 2019-23. In July 2020, Education Uncovered reported how the government had paid Avanti £490,000 in “academy transfer grant funding” to take the three schools on in the first place. This was the highest of any such payment in 2019-20. Also that year, the government wrote off debts at the three schools totalling £686,000, the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s annual report had stated. 

So that would mean the taxpayer spent an extra £3m supporting these three schools over the period 2019-23, either through direct subsidies to Avanti (£2.4 m) or through the debt write-off at the Steiner schools the trust took on.

Avanti is also revealed in the DfE’s annual academy accounts for 2020-21 as having received £1.1m - £723,359 in “non-repayable funding” and £341,100 in a loan – that year to support taking on a new school. Government records only indicate it taking on one academy during 2020 or 2021: a free school in Hertfordshire called Avanti Meadows Primary.

There is a final twist to this tale: during 2022-23 Avanti actually handed over one of the three former Steiner academies it had taken on. Its Avanti Hall School, in Exeter, was handed over to the Reach South trust, low pupil numbers having impacted its viability, Avanti said on announcing the move in October 2022. By August 2023, it had joined Reach South.

So the DfE appears either to have paid the £1.8m to Avanti in 2022-23 either to subsidise the two small former Steiner schools it was still running by the end of that year, or to fund those two plus the school that it would give up for financial reasons during that year.

I sought further details from Avanti, but did not receive a response from the trust.