Changes to sponsorship of Academy Schools
publication date: Oct 31, 2006
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author/source: R Taylor
In July, the DfES quietly announced a new model for Academy School sponsorship. Previously sponsors had in theory to stump up £2m to become a sponsor (in reality some paid less). The new deal will push funds through a charitable endowment fund structure – i.e. long-term endowments that should be spent on a school’s educational needs and specifically to tackle disadvantage. All sounds wonderful, but the reality is that it allows sponsors to drip feed their money into an endowment fund rather than having to fund £2m up front.
How a sponsorship investment transmogrifies into an educational endowment, which is by its very nature philanthropic (i.e. non-commercial) is a linguistic ploy that seems at odds with the Oxford Dictionary definition of an investment as being, ‘a thing worth buying because it may be profitable or useful in the future’. From a commercial perspective we hope this is true but doubt the DfES or Sir Cyril Taylor would agree.
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