Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?

With everyone still waiting for the Secretary of State to make his pronouncement regarding the future of the Route 39 free school in North Devon, it has been quite some time since anyone has cast an eye over their recent activities. So, given the poor weather this past weekend, NDG decided to catch up with the ‘goings-on’ in Happy Valley, just to see how they were all doing. Surely all must be well in La-La Land?

With the fairly recent departure of the very principled former principal, NDG was interested to see what changes had been initiated in pursuit of the ‘requires improvement’ judgement that Ofsted had placed on the free school. Regular readers will no doubt recall that ‘quality of teaching’ and ‘achievement of pupils’ were the two most glaring; shall we politely say ‘areas of under-achievement’, that were highlighted by the Ofsted inspectors, when they visited the free school in that idyllic ‘Summer of 2015’.

Well, it now appears that governance and financial control may be other areas that ‘requires improvement’.

On October 6th 2014, NDG highlighted the deficiency of Route 39 and its trustees to conform to the standards and regulations for public transparency that other schools across the nation have to abide by and to which Route 39 trustees agreed when they signed their Education Funding Agency (EFA) funding contract. In particular we highlighted a lack of clarity and avoidance of public scrutiny through an apparent inability to publish the minutes of any governing body meetings on the Route 39 website.

A quick look at the Route 39 website tonight reveals that the Academy Trust has not published a single minute from any meeting since 16th October 2014. Well, we hear you shout, ‘they probably haven’t had any meetings since then!’. Unfortunately this is not so – a short read of the ‘Report of the Trustees and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 August 2015 for Route 39 Academy Trust Limited‘ clearly states that within the time frame of the report, the trustees held seven Board of Trustees meetings (Page 7) and seven Finance and Personnel sub-committee meetings (Page 8), the minutes of which should all be in the public domain as; after all, this is public money that the trustees are accountable for!

Perhaps publishing minutes of these important meetings on the school website for parents, colleagues and the local constituency to read is yet another thing that Free Schools can arbitrarily ‘opt out’ of, however this would seem most unusual for any new school seeking to demonstrate its openness towards its local community: Respect – Engage – Aspire we seem to recall!

The Report of the Trustees… also reveals a couple of other very interesting points.

In terms of internal audit and scrutiny of the financial systems and management controls being exercised within Route 39, the trustees decided that this year, they didn’t need to fuss themselves with the appointment of an internal auditor, instead appointing the Chair of the Board of Trustees as a ‘reviewer’, to carry out some internal checks (Page 10). A reasonable person might stop to wonder how appropriate it may be that the individual responsible for signing off the Effectiveness of Governance Statement is also the same individual that is conducting the audit of internal financial control?

Also, having obviously read diligently through the Report of the Trustees and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 August 2015 for Route 39 Academy Trust Limited, and then duly signed (or ‘singed’ as the document incoherently states) these official documents as a true and accurate record of affairs on behalf of the members of the Board of Trustees, one wonders why they failed to notice that the Report of the Independent Auditors to the Members of Route 39 Academy Trust Limited states quite clearly that their Senior Statutory Auditor has audited the financial statements for the ‘Steiner Academy Exeter‘ for the Year Ended 31 August 2015 (Page 14).

You’d think that with the £000’s being paid to the auditors for their ‘professional advice and diligence’, the very least they could have done was ‘cut and paste’ the correct Academy name into the documents and that the trustees could have bothered to read and check the statements properly before signing and publishing them, after all they are responsible for more than £918,000 of our money!

Which leads us to perhaps the most perturbing part of the financial statement and the conclusion of the Independent Accountant.

The Conclusion on Page 17 states that “the Academies Handbook 2014 requires an Academy to manage a programme of risk and checking of financial controls appropriate to the Academies circumstances. Furthermore, the Academies Handbook 2014 requires an Academy to reconcile bank and control accounts regularly.”

The conclusion further states “From our work, the Academy did not carry out adequate checks and bank and control accounts were not reconciled. As a result of these issues of non-compliance, the risk of irregularity is high.” (Page 17)

Do we see something of a pattern developing here?

We were told the free school would be great, we were told that these people knew what they were doing, we were reassured by Government and MP’s that everything would be fine – and yet we see pitiful demand for the free school, independent inspections finding inadequacies in the fundamental elements of teaching and achievement and now we see that the financial governance, management and control appears, if you believe the published statement of accounts, to be virtually non-existent! What is going on?

Does anyone else perhaps think the ‘Chief Watcher’ – the Secretary of State needs to hear about this pretty smartly?