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HC 941 - Establishing Free Schools

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2014-05-09

Total Pages: 64

ISBN-13: 0215071921

Recent high-profile failures demonstrate that the Department for Education and the Education Funding Agency's oversight arrangements for free schools are not yet working effectively. The Department and Agency have set up an approach to oversight which emphasises schools' autonomy, but standards of financial management and governance in some free schools are clearly not up to scratch. The Agency relies on high levels of compliance by schools, yet fewer than half of free schools submitted their required financial returns for 2011-12 to the Agency on time. Whistleblowers played a major role in uncovering recent scandals when problems should have been identified through the Agency's monitoring processes. There is also concern that applications for new free schools are not emerging from areas of greatest forecast need for more and better school places. The Department needs to set out how, and by when, it will encourage applications from areas with a high or severe forecast need for extra schools places, working with local authorities where appropriate. The Department should also be more open about the reasons for making decisions. Capital costs of the free school programme are escalating. The most recent round of approved free schools had a greater proportion of more expensive types, such as secondaries, special and alternative provision, located in more expensive regions such as London, the South East and South West. If this mix of approved free schools continues, there is a risk of costs exceeding available funding.

HC 258 - Academies and Free Schools

Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Education Committee

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 0215081188

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The landscape of schooling in England has been transformed over the last five years. Academy sponsorship has encouraged and facilitated the contribution of individuals not previously involved in education provision and laid down a challenge to maintained schools to improve or face replacement by the insurgent academy model. The development of outstanding Multi Academy Trusts like Ark and Harris offers an alternative system to the one overseen by local authorities while the unified Ofsted inspection regime and published performance data generally allows fair judgment of comparative performance. There is a complex relationship between attainment, autonomy, collaboration and accountability. Current evidence does not allow the Committee to draw conclusions on whether academies in themselves are a positive force for change. This is partly a matter of timing but more information is needed on the performance of individual academy chains. Most academy freedoms are in fact available to all schools and Committee recommends that curriculum freedoms are also extended to maintained schools.

HC 1110 - Promoting Electronic Growth Locally

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2014-05-16

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 021507274X

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Despite the large sums available for promoting economic growth locally, little money has actually reached businesses. Of the £3.9 billion that has been allocated in total to these initiatives, only nearly £400 million had made it to local projects by the end of 2012-13. Under the Regional Growth Fund, the largest of the schemes, the Departments will need to spend £1.4 billion this year, compared to the £1.2 billion spent over the previous three years. Some £1 billion of the remaining £3.5 billion allocated to initiatives is currently parked with intermediary bodies such as local authorities, Local Enterprise Partnerships and banks - and the rest with the Departments. The Departments should introduce binding milestones for distributing funds and move quickly to claw back money not being spent - or spent disproportionately on administration - and redistribute it to better performers. Progress in creating jobs is falling well short of the Departments' initial expectations. The Departments' estimate of the cost per job created has also risen from £30,400 in Round One to £52,300 in Round Four - a 72% increase. The Departments also agreed that there is a risk of double-counting, with the same jobs scored more than once to different initiatives. The local growth initiatives have not been managed as a coordinated programme with a common strategy, objectives or plan. The recent creation by the Departments of a single growth directorate and a programme board is welcomed. Concern remains however that the Departments are not yet using the new oversight arrangements effectively.

HC 1063 - Education Funding Agency And Department For Education 2012-13 Financial Statements

Author:

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13: 0215072871

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This Public Accounts Committee report examines the Education Funding Agency and Department for Education 2012-13 financial statements. Since it was set up in April 2012, the Education Funding Agency (the Agency) has succeeded in getting money to education providers on time. In 2012-13, the Agency distributed £51 billion of capital and revenue funding for 10 million learners to local authorities, academies, academy trusts, further education institutions, sixth-form colleges and other types of education providers. Between 2012-13 and 2015-16, the Agency expects that the number of all education providers it funds will increase by around 50% to almost 12,000, of which nearly 7,000 will be academies. At the same time, the Agency plans to reduce its administration costs by 15%, a huge challenge. It should improve efficiency, transparency and accountability in the education sector, especially in respect of the growing number of academies, but lacks the systems and data it needs. The Agency has not yet achieved an acceptable level of compliance with its reporting requirements and the Committee finds it is too reactive and does not spot risks or intervene in schools quickly enough. Not enough is known about conflicts of interest in academies and the risk they pose to the proper use of public money, not The Agency has no way of knowing whether academy chief executives and trustees are 'fit-and-proper persons', and there are flaws in the methodology used to consolidate the accounts of academies, as well as data quality issues, which undermine accountability.

HC 1141 - The Work of the Committee of Public Accounts 2010-15

Author: Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 41

ISBN-13: 0215085779

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This report summarises the key areas of the Committee's work over the past five years. It draws out the areas where progress has been made and where their successors might wish to press in future. The Committee has assiduously followed the taxpayer's pound wherever it was spent. Since 2010 they held 276 evidence sessions and published 244 unanimous reports to hold government to account for its performance. 88% of their recommendations were accepted by departments. In many cases they successfully secured substantial changes, for example with the once secret tax avoidance industry. They secured consensus from government and from industry that private providers of public services do have a duty of care to the taxpayer, and in pushing the protection of whistleblowers further up the agenda of all government departments. By drawing attention to mistakes in the Department for Transport's procurement of the West Coast Mainline, more recent procurements for Crossrail, Thameslink and Intercity Express have all benefited from more expert advice and a more appropriate level of challenge from senior staff. After discovery in 2012-13 that 63% of calls to government call centres were to higher rate telephone numbers, the Government accepted our recommendation that telephone lines serving vulnerable and low income groups never be charged above the geographic rate and that 03 numbers should be available for all government telephone lines. They also secured a commitment to close large mental health hospitals.

Education, Law and Diversity

Author: Neville Harris

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-01-09

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 150990672X

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This new edition of Education, Law and Diversity provides extensive updated analysis, from a legal perspective, of how the education system responds to social diversity and how the relevant social and cultural rights of individuals and groups are affected. It spans wide-ranging areas of school provision, including: types of school (including faith schools), the school curriculum, choice of school, out-of-school settings, and duties towards children with special needs and disabilities. It gives extensive coverage to children's rights in the context of education and includes considerable new material on issues including relationships and sex education, exclusion from school, home education, equal access, counter-extremism and academisation. The new edition also retains and updates areas of debate in the book, such as those concerned with multiculturalism and the position of religion in schools. It continues to focus on England but also makes reference to other jurisdictions within the UK and internationally. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the legal and related policy issues surrounding children's education today.

The Coalition Effect, 2010–2015

Author: Anthony Seldon

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-03-26

Total Pages: 645

ISBN-13: 1107080614

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The essential verdict on Britain's first coalition government since the Second World War delivered by an unrivalled team of experts.

HC 1114 - Probation: Landscape Review

Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2014-05-20

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13: 0215072790

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The Ministry of Justice is implementing wholesale changes to how rehabilitation services for offenders are delivered in England and Wales on a highly ambitious timescale. It intends to introduce new private and voluntary providers, bring in a payment by results system, create a new National Probation Service and extend the service to short-term prisoners in a very short time period. This is very challenging and this report sets out a number of risks that need to be managed. The probation service in England and Wales supervised 225,000 offenders in our communities during 2012-13, at a cost of £853 million. The service is currently delivered by 35 Probation Trusts which are independent Non-Departmental Public Bodies, reporting directly to the National Offender Management Service. As part of the Ministry's Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, the Trusts will cease to operate from 31 May 2014 and will be abolished shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a National Probation Service and 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies. The scale, complexity and pace of the reforms give rise to risks around value for money which need to be carefully managed. The Committee welcomes the Accounting Officer's assurances that the Ministry will not proceed with the arrangements unless it is safe to do so. The Ministry expects the new National Probation Service and the 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies to begin operating from 1 June 2014 with only a limited opportunity for parallel running of the new arrangements during April and May 2014. The movement of staff, records and implementation of the arrangements required to make the new structures operate are ongoing. Initially the Community Rehabilitation Companies will be in public ownership pending a share sale, expected in time to launch a payment by results mechanism in 2015.