MORE than three quarters of a million pounds was paid by the sponsor of two Bolton academies to a “parent company”, a report has revealed.

The Northern Education Trust, which runs Kearsley Academy and The Ferns Primary in Farnworth, was one of a number of academy sponsors examined in the report, which found that academy schools were paying large sums of public money to trust board members and their companies.

There was no suggestion in the report that the Northern Education Trust had broken any rules.

Northern Education Trust runs 18 schools and was formed by Northern Education Associates — a school improvement company.

The report — Conflicts of Interest in Academy Sponsorship Arrangements — revealed that in 2012/13, the trust paid £782,147 for “school improvement services” to its parent company.

The trust also paid £30,000 to two directors of the parent company — the managing director and the wife of the chairman — for “specialist project management serv-ices”, the report added The Northern Education Trust was highlighted as an example of an organisation having “real or potential conflicts of interest”.

But the report also said that payments to businesses in which the academy's trustees had a beneficial interest were permitted if the trust had fully complied with its own conditions. It said that Northern Education Trust was an example of this.

The report, commissioned by the Education Select Committee, said: “The general sense from the evidence collected for this study is that the checks and balances on academy trusts in relation to conflicts of interest are still too weak.

“We came across a significant number of real or potential conflicts of interest.”

The report also said “questionable practices” were being signed off by academies across the UK within the existing rules.

Northern Education Trust chief executive Roger Alston said: “As the report makes clear, the information on payments from the trust to the business is set out in our published accounts.

“We comply with all the strict rules that the EFA rightly lays down, including the fact that these arrangements were at cost and excluded the normal profit element that any business would usually make.”

The Education Select Committee's Tory chairman Graham Stuart said: “The public needs to be sure that academy sponsors act only in the interest of their schools "

A department for education spokesman said: “We are clear that no individual or organisation with a governing relationship to an academy can make a profit from providing it with services.”