Education and Adoption Bill

In response to the proposal that I made in Committee, the Minister said that academies’ accounts undergo greater audits than those of local authority maintained schools, but I suggest that that is probably not the case. I am the governor of a school in the local maintained sector. The school’s accounts are published as part of the local authority’s accounts, which are audited by a senior auditing company—KPMG in this case. Therefore, the internal and external audit of the accounts is carried out by the council’s own internal auditor and by external auditors. I am not suggesting that they are any better than the audited accounts of academies in terms of overall performance, and I think it is erroneous to suggest that one is better than the other.