The regulation of education currently focuses on the need to protect consumers. In higher education we have nationally imposed controls over what can be called a university, over which bodies can award a qualification claiming to be a degree, and (to a lesser extent) over the content of a degree course.

And in the schools sector we have a national curriculum, national standards for examinations and a state-funded body to secure them, and a national system of quality inspection of schools.

Although there are flaws in the system there is nevertheless an overall coherence to it – or at least there has been in the past. But this has now changed in two important respects.

First, the plethora of new models of school education, with free schools and academies now sitting alongside local authority maintained, voluntary aided, voluntary controlled and foundation schools, and with a variety of sponsorship arrangements and funding agreements for the new free schools and academies, means that many of the rights and safeguards that pupils and parents have traditionally enjoyed no longer exist or are in practice now unenforceable.

This is already true of aspects of admissions, exclusions, SEN provision and curriculum content, but will over time become an even stronger feature of the schools system as more and more maintained schools are shoe-horned into adopting the new models, and more nationally provided schools make use of the freedoms they have in relation to teacher qualifications and pay.

Second, the current system recognises that taxpayers have rights too, even those who are also students or parents, but the new system contains few of the essential safeguards.

This is especially true of academies operating within group structures – which are now being actively promoted by the Department for Education.

Academies and the groups that encompass or sponsor them take many different forms, but the thing they all have in common is that they are wholly dependent on public funds.

And the providers of public funds, taxpayers, are entitled to expect that the money parliament allocates to school-age education is distributed fairly, is spent wisely and economically, and is accounted for within a framework which is transparent and allows questions to be asked of those responsible for delivering the outcomes the expenditure is intended to secure.

In the maintained schools system this is achieved through public audit and local and national politicalaccountability. Schools are funded through a formula which is published and subject to public debate.

And the way in which they spend the funds allocated to them is subject to a public audit regime which differs from private sector audit in important aspects.

For example, it involves independent appointment of auditors. It has a wider scope, embracing propriety in the use of public money as well as proper accounting for its use.

It places an obligation on the auditor to report on the arrangements for securing value for money in the spending of public funds, and it empowers the auditor to report publicly (not just to the audited body) in relation to any concerns that may arise from the audit.

This latter power is not used frequently, but for that very reason its use is invariably telling. So, for example, the former Head of Whalley Range High School in Manchester, Jean Else, who was made a Dame in 2001, became the first woman in British history to be stripped of this title after auditors reported in 2005 that she
had been guilty of extravagance and nepotism in the use of school funds, including holding lavish private parties and appointing her sister as her deputy.

And it was as a result of public audit that in 2003 Colleen McCabe, the former head teacher of Saint John Rigby Catholic College in the London Borough of Bromley, was sent to prison for five years after being convicted of stealing around £500,000 from school funds to spend on expensive holidays, shoes, handbags and other personal items including a Crystal Palace Season Ticket.

The fraud occurred while the school had Grant Maintained status and was only discovered as a result of it reverting to local authority control in 1998.

But were such circumstances to occur in the future, the chances of it resulting
in decisive auditor action, or even ever coming to light, would be slim by comparison with these examples, or others in a similar vein.

For many of the schools now being created are not required to produce accounts, their expenditure instead being consolidated into group accounts, and the auditors of the group accounts have more limited responsibilities than those of public auditors for accountability

This is a less accountable model even than the university sector, all of which
is within the private sector for national accounting purposes.

Moreover, the right of taxpayers to expect that public funding will be distributed fairly and spent wisely is undermined in the schools sector not merely by the existence of inexplicable differences in the funding agreements with different academy trusts but also by the funding of new free schools in areas where there is no shortage of places in maintained schools.

The absence of any explanation for the differences which exist in funding arrangements, especially in respect of capital expenditure, also violates the principle of transparency which, in other areas, the Coalition Government has rightly chosen to promote.

So it is time we had a wider debate about the appropriate public accountability framework for the new free schools and academies. Who should parents complain to when something goes wrong? What can they do to put it right? And how do you sack those responsible if schools ignore locally raised concerns?

It would be unrealistic to expect the DfE to intervene in any but the most extreme cases, even if it was equipped with the powers and skills to do so. But some form of intervention may be required not merely in cases of fraud and theft.

It may also be an appropriate response to, for example, an unwillingness to help raise aspirations among parents from deprived backgrounds, to contribute to adult education and improved public health outcomes, or to play a full role in the child protection system.

Of course, a suitable accountability mechanism would need to recognise that many of the new schools are very small and that there limits to what can reasonably be expected of the National Audit Office in relation to the audit of around 25,000 state-funded schools.

But if we continue to allow the rights of taxpayers and parents to be eroded in this sector, those rights will come under attack in other sectors too.

Steve Bundred is former chief executive of the Audit Commission