What’s the difference between a charity and a Non Departmental Public Body (NDPB)? Very little if you’re the Teaching Awards (TA). Since their inception, the TA have relied on funding from the DfES to survive. Money has flowed in as direct grants and through proxies such as the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA).

Back in 2003 Charles Clarke, then Secretary of State at the DfES, commissioned an internal report looking at the department’s relationship with the TA. It concluded that, ‘There are serious problems in the operation of the Teaching Awards. The department needs to avoid being seen as the financial backstop’. The report goes on to make a series of recommendations and notes the DfES’s involvement has always been, ‘at one remove, in order to safeguard the independence of the TA and to prevent the perception that the Awards were an extension of the department and its policies’.

Noble sentiments, except the DfES have always been the TA’s main financial backer, to the tune of £750k in 2005/6. While most of the money is classified as being a grant, these are defined in the TA’s Accounting Polices as income ‘where these amount to a contract for services’. But we can’t find any contract for services, and the only service to the DfES seems to be as a PR tool. The TA changed their financial year to 31 March to bring it in line with its major sponsors’. The only sponsor with the same financial year is the DfES.

Perhaps if the TA really was a celebration of education that helped improve student learning then it might be worthwhile as a charity or NDPB, but the fact is no-one knows what impact it has had as there is no independent longitudinal research to assess this. Instead the TA, in their report to the Charities Commission, focus on media metrics like:

• OTS of 260m
• AVE £3.7m

OTS (Opportunity to See) if correct means having the opportunity to reach every person in the UK 4.3 times during 2006. Unfortunately, they make no mention of whether any of this led to any actual recognition, awareness or knowledge of the TA. Similarly AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency) was estimated at £3.7m from 1510 items of coverage or £2,450 per item of coverage. This means that in terms of press coverage the TA got the equivalent of 325 half-page colour advertisements in The Guardian. But as these figures are calculated internally and are not subject to any audit or benchmarking, it is hard to take them seriously.

To cap it all off the TA claim that in 2006 Value In Kind (VIK) support totalled almost £600k. Yet the Report to Trustees’ by auditors BDO Stoy Hayward noted that ‘Value/cost of the donation is not formally confirmed by the donor before inputting into the accounts, therefore potentially misstated’. The response of the TA’s Management was, ‘This is not possible where VIK are gifts’. The Charities Commission must be a far more trusting lot than the Inland Revenue.

The TA gets more direct income than many of the DfES’s official NDPBs. Let’s call a spade a spade, the TA is (for better or worse) part of the DfES. But getting the Charities Commission to do anything might be difficult as its Chair is Dame Suzi Leather. That’s right, the same Dame Suzi Leather who was Chair of the School Food Trust (a DfES NDPB) and who is also a member of the Christian Socialist Movement and Labour Party (according to the Charities Commission’s Register of Interests). Given her close connection to Labour, we can’t see her leaning too hard on an education charity set up by Lord Putnam (a Labour Peer) which has been funded by grants (with no oversight or performance targets) from Estelle Morris, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Ruth Kelly and Alan Johnson.

As someone we spoke to wryly commented, ‘If the TA really wanted to celebrate education, they’d abandon the Awards and any pretence of independence, and send every teacher in the country a bottle of champagne - it’d have far more impact than a gilded statuette!’

The TA can afford it; according to their own estimate they need just £150k in reserve (three months operating funds), yet they have £450k. £300k won’t buy a decent bottle of champagne for every teacher, but it’s enough for a small knees-up in every staffroom.