Schools Week has looked at some of the details surrounding emergency payments to academies: £12.6m 'emergency' handouts for 22 schools. The article lists the most recent large recipients of the funding - you can find a full list of schools that received this deficit funding over the last three years here.
As this breakdown shows, the repayable funding was only available in the last financial year 2013/14. This suggests there may have been a change in the nature of this funding.
One possible explanation could be that another form of emergency funding for academies - the shorter term 'advances of funding' - may be proving problematic. Some academies that have received this shorter term funding (it must be paid back in a year) may not have been able to meet the tight deadline. Meanwhile the demand for this 'advances of funding' seems to be rising.
The solution may have been to turn these short-term loans into longer-term repayable deficit funding. This might explain the appearance of repayable deficit funding in 2013/14.
However this explanation is entirely speculative! The truth may be something entirely different.
But some light is shed on these issues by one example that seems to cover all the bases.
St Aldhelm's academy in Dorset has received £925,000 in advance funding which must be paid back within a year.
In the same year it received £360,000 in deficit funding.
The reason it needed the cash was because it was the victim of a £1.2 million fraud.
However the academy was losing cash each year anyway due to low pupil numbers. This situation led its auditors to claim that the school was no longer a going concern. Putting all this together it seems unlikely that the school could give a convincing promise to pay back the £925,000 inside a year (although it might do!).
The existence of repayable deficit funding might make a problem like this more flexible.
The situation at St Aldhelm's is also interesting because the academy is seeking a new sponsor. It seems likely that the EFA will have to negotiate a deal in which any new sponsor will be protected from suffering financially.
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