Perry Beeches Academy to pay back £100k of funding

Birmingham academy Perry Beeches Trust has been instructed to pay back more than £100,000 in government funding.

The academy claimed around £2.8 million from the Education Funding Agency (EFA) for free school meals but kept a limited record of its entitlements.

A report by the EFA said this was a breach of government guidelines and has ordered the trust to hand back £118,000 for failing to keep adequate records of pupils entitled to free school meals for the years 2013-14, and limited data for 2015. The trust, which runs five schools, has insisted the missing records are a genuine admin error.

The controversy follows a previous financial investigation which found the trust to have paid an additional salary of £160,000 over two years to its chief executive Liam Nolan through a third party agreement.

A spokesperson for the school said: "This was a genuine administration error on the system as the details were overwritten by someone who mistakenly thought that was the right way to do it.

"The management of administration was one of the points the EFA picked up on in the report and the trust have been working with them to correct procedures such as this one.

"The trust feels that if a mistake has been made and that money has been claimed by the trust in error, then it of course has to be repaid."