Revealed: the covert �20 million payments by schools to head office of one of England’s largest academy chains

The London headquarters of Academies Enterprise Trust

Schools at one of England’s largest academy trusts have been secretly paying more than £20 million a year between them to its head office, for services often said not to work properly or to barely exist, an investigation by this website reveals today.

Multi-million pound payments for services including grounds maintenance, human resources and a mysterious “contribution target” have been making their way for years from its schools to the headquarters of the Academies Enterprise Trust (AET).

Yet these transactions appear not to feature in the chain’s published accounts. They are seemingly known about only by its schools’ leadership teams. But detailed, academy-by-academy breakdowns of the payments are disclosed in documents now seen by this website.

The difference between the amounts paid to head office as disclosed in the annual accounts and those viewable in these internal documents is huge. They take an apparent contribution to head office of five per cent of a school’s budgets to, in the case of five AET schools, one of more than 17 per cent.