Academy Apportionments
What are Academy Trusts?
Academy trusts are groups of academies that oversee finances, curriculum, and performance for their member schools. Because trusts exist to serve their academies, individual academies want to understand how much of their trust’s expenditure is attributable to them.
Trusts submit consolidated accounts for the trust and its academies to the Department for Education (DfE). In practice, some academies also submit their own accounts, which can create duplicates that we resolve during processing.
How Apportionment Works
Trust expenditure is distributed (apportioned) to its member academies using two methods:
- Pupil numbers: Most expenditure is apportioned based on each academy’s pupil count as a proportion of total trust pupils
- Floor area: Utility and premises costs are distributed based on the physical space each academy occupies
FBIT Implementation
In FBIT (Financial Benchmarking Insight Tool), we combine central trust figures with individual academy data so academies can see how much of the trust’s central expenditure is attributable to them.
Each academy’s share of the trust’s central costs is calculated using the apportionment method above and then scaled by the fraction of the financial year the academy belonged to the trust. For example, if an academy joins a trust for just one day in a financial year, its share of central expenditure would be close to zero.
Trust Membership Changes
Joiners
Joiners are apportioned on a part-year, pro-rata basis for the period they belonged to the trust (as described above).
Leavers
Under normal circumstances, adding up all the apportioned central service expenditure for the academies in a trust equals the trust’s total central expenditure. However, this total can be less than the trust’s actual spend when membership changes during the financial year.
Why this happens: When an academy leaves a trust partway through a year, the trust’s central expenditure includes money spent while that academy was still a member. Since the end-of-year members are different, summing their apportioned central service shares may be less than the total central spend.
The result: The trust’s central expenditure may appear higher than the sum of its current members’ apportioned shares, because it includes historical spending on academies that are no longer part of the trust.
Revenue reserve apportionment
Revenue reserve is treated differently from in-year expenditure because it is a balance at year end, not spend across the year. Because revenue reserve is a balance at a point in time (the year end), we only allocate it to academies that are in the trust at the end of the period. Academies that have left the trust during the year contribute to the trust’s historical balances, but their share is not shown as an apportioned revenue reserve for them in FBIT.
Pupil numbers for revenue reserve apportionments need to be based on trust members at the end of the period, rather than pupil numbers including leaving trust members. This ensures that no apportionment is allocated to leaving or closing members of a trust.