Exclusive: MPs told to mount probe into Bradford school fraud scandal

The National Union of Teachers’ general secretary Kevin Courtney has written to the head of both the Public Accounts Committee and the Education Select Committee calling for them to hold inquiries into other matters at the former free school now the court case has concluded.

The Bradford free school’s founder and former principal Sajid Hussain Raza, his sister Shabana Hussain, who was a teacher, and the school’s finance director Daud Khan were jailed for making payments into personal bank accounts from Department for Education grants.

School for scandal: Bradford ‘academy’ that ticked all the right boxes

The Yorkshire Post can reveal the NUT is now calling for more scrutiny of events surrounding Kings which was one of the Government’s first 24 free schools to open in 2011 and was visited and praised by former Prime Minister David Cameron.

The letter from Mr Courtney calls for the MPs to look at the why there was no police investigation for almost six months after allegations of fraud at the free school were first reported by the Government to the authorities.

It also questions why the DfE says it believes there was no chairman of governors in place at the Kings Science Academy for its first 12 months having previously believed it was Alan Lewis, who was also the vice chairman of the Conservative Party at that time.

Mr Lewis has always denied he was the chairman of governors.

Questions over £6m land deal at controversial Bradford free school

The NUT also urges the two committees of MPs to look at the rent deal which saw the Kings Science Academy built on land belonging to Mr Lewis’ company. The deal will see around £6m paid to the Hartley Group over a 20-year lease.

When the Government agreed the deal it had also believed was the school’s chairman of governors.

The Kings Science Academy was taken over by the Dixons Academy chain in 2015 and is now called Dixons Kings Academy.

Financial irregularities at the Kings Science Academy the school first came to light after a Department for Education investigation report found that fabricated invoices had been submitted to it by the school to claim for rent when the school was being set up.

The investigation report recommended the matter be passed to the police.

The DfE had phoned fraud authorities, in April 2013, to report its findings but the call was mistakenly classed as being for information only and not passed to the police for criminal investigation.

The fraud scandal then hit the public domain six months later, in October that year, when the DfE published a redacted version of its investigation report after it had already been leaked to Newsnight.

The DfE said at the time that it had informed police who decided no further action was necessary. It then emerged that this was because Action Fraud, the centre which handles reports of financial crime, had wrongly treated the matter as being for informational only. The DfE blamed this mistake by Action Fraud for the matter not being investigated sooner.

However documents obtained under the freedom of informatio action by The Yorkshire Post showed that seven weeks before this mistake came to light the DfE had already been told by Action Fraud that the matter had been dealt with as an information report and would not be looked at for criminal investigation unless it was reported as a crime.

Emails show the DfE asked for an update in September and were told more information and a crime report would be needed for police to investigate. But the DfE did not respond to this meaning the matter was not looked at by police until the scandal broke and people questioned why there had been no investigation.

In his letter Mr Courtney said: “It is not in the public interest for the DfE to appear content for allegations of fraud not to be fully investigated by the police.”

He adds that the NUT believes “failure to ensure this crime was fully investigated as a matter of urgency is a very serious matter.”

Previously the DfE said: “All allegations of financial mismanagement are taken extremely seriously and the free school programme is designed so that these issues can be dealt with far more quickly than in council-run schools. “In this case, the Education Funding Agency acted as soon as allegations were made and, thanks to that swift action, inappropriately used public funds were recovered.”

The DfE added that on the discovery of fraud, the department notified Action Fraud. It said Action Fraud chose to take no further action. However on further investigation, the police considered this response inappropriate and took action to investigate the case.

However it declined to comment on the NUT letter.