Methodology & caveats

Where the numbers come from

In order of how much we trust them:

1. Filed annual reports and financial statements — audited accounts filed at Companies House by each academy trust (and, for the independent school, accounts at Companies House and the Charity Commission). These are the primary source for income, expenditure, staff costs, reserves and pay bands. Each school page cites the exact filings used.
2. Companies House registry data — incorporation dates, company numbers, registered offices, filing histories and deadlines, read from the public register.
3. DfE data services — the Financial Benchmarking and Insights Tool (school-level figures, which matter for schools inside multi-academy trusts), Get Information About Schools, and published 16–19 funding allocations on gov.uk.
4. The schools' and trusts' own websites — statutory financial-information pages, published accounts copies and fee schedules.
5. Reputable press — used only for context (for example reported philanthropic commitments), always labelled as press rather than a filing.

The verification badges

from filed accounts means the figure was read directly from the cited audited document. partly verified means it comes from a cited document but with a caveat stated in place — for example a scanned filing read by OCR, or a figure the source presents ambiguously. unverified means we could not confirm it in a primary document, and it is presented only as what a secondary source claims. Where we found nothing solid, the site says not published rather than guessing — the same standard as the rest of the mathsschools.co.uk family.

Reading scanned filings

Several accounts in the register — particularly older ones — are scanned images rather than digital documents. We extracted those with optical character recognition and then sanity-checked every figure against its row and column totals. OCR can misread digits; anywhere a figure rests on OCR alone and could not be cross-checked, it is flagged partly verified on the page that uses it.

Why some schools have no stand-alone accounts

Four state maths schools are academies inside larger multi-academy trusts. A trust files one consolidated set of accounts for all its academies, so there is no Companies House document that shows those schools' finances alone. For them we show the trust-wide picture, clearly labelled, alongside whatever school-level figures the DfE benchmarking service and the trust's own narrative disclose. Trust-wide numbers are never presented as the school's own.

Accounting caveats that matter

• Years end 31 August. "2023/24" means the year ended 31 August 2024. Accounts are due at Companies House nine months later, so the newest available year lags real life.
• Pension accounting distorts headline results. Academy trusts carry Local Government Pension Scheme positions that swing with actuarial assumptions, not school decisions. Where possible we quote results with the treatment the accounts themselves use, and state it.
• Capital grants are lumpy. A school that received a building grant looks artificially rich that year. We flag capital-heavy years rather than letting them read as operating surpluses.
• Different sources measure differently. DfE benchmarking figures and audited accounts use different bases and will not reconcile to the pound. We never mix figures from two bases in one comparison without saying so.

People and pay

Filed accounts name trustees and officers and disclose senior pay in £10,000 bands — that is a statutory public disclosure. We reproduce only what the filings themselves publish, at the band level they publish it, and nothing more personal than that.

Independence

This site is independently compiled and is not affiliated with any school, trust, university, the Department for Education or the U-Maths network. Nothing here is financial or admissions advice; it is a documentary read of the public record. Corrections are welcome — if a school believes a figure misreads its filings, we will check it against the document and fix it.