From 1 October 2026, every multi-academy trust in England has to publish a new summary statement of its financial arrangements. It goes on the trust website, alongside the audited accounts [1][2].
October is when the duty starts. The statement itself appears whenever you publish your accounts — and those have to be on the website by 31 January 2027 at the latest [2]. Publish in November and the statement goes up in November. So the date to work back from is January, not October.
It looks like an admin job. Mostly it is — until you get to your buildings.
The statement has three jobs. Say how funding moves around the trust, including whether you pool income or reserves. Say how central services get paid for. And set out the position for each academy: how much DfE funding it receives, how much is spent on it, and what it is charged for central services [3][4]. Those expenditure figures should match your audited accounts [4].
A number against each school. Not the trust total, and not a paragraph about priorities.
Worth saying early, because it is an easy assumption to make. This is not a school-by-school breakdown of roofs, boilers, condition surveys or capital works. The guidance asks for academy-level totals. Two academies published at, say, £4.2m and £5.1m tell a parent something about scale. They say nothing about either building.
What it does ask for is how the money works: whether you pool it, top-slice it or recharge it, and how the centre gets paid [5].
Which is where estates comes in.
If your trust runs premises from the middle — one maintenance team, one set of surveys, one compliance record, one energy contract — then estates can sit within your central services.
The Accounts Direction already names premises alongside general administration, finance and HR as one of the costs of a trust's central functions, and sets out what sits inside it: cleaning and caretaking, maintenance, security, energy, utilities, insurance and risk protection [7]. The new guidance's own list of typical central services doesn't mention premises, but it is openly a starting point — finance, HR, procurement, legal, and "other services as needs arise" [6].
So the disclosure itself can be straightforward. Estates sits in the central pot, the pot is in the accounts, and the statement explains how it works.
The harder bit is what happens next. Broadly, there are two ways of handling it.
Keep the estates money in the centre. Then the academy figures won't necessarily show what each school's buildings actually cost. So the central-services explanation needs to be clear enough that a parent or governor can understand what is being provided centrally and how it is funded.
Or charge it out to the schools. Then you need a way of splitting it. How much of the shared surveyor belongs to each school? The energy contract? It has to be a method you can explain, not a number you landed on.
A trust can also do some of both, and that is fine — DfE is explicit that you can use some, all or none of the pooling and recharging options [5]. But either way, someone has to write down where the buildings sit in the model, and that may be something nobody outside finance has ever had to put on paper.
The Accounts Direction already requires every trust with multiple academies to include a note in its financial statements covering the types of central services it provides, its policy for charging for them, and the actual charges placed on each academy [8]. That one is a must.
The new statement brings that together with the wider funding model and the academy-level figures, and it should align with the audited accounts, including those notes on central services and funding [3].
What changes is where it lands. On the website, in a form that people who would never open a set of academy accounts can read. The money and the buildings, in the same public document.
You can choose the format [9]. Not the content — the operating model, the central-services funding and the academy-level figures all have to be there.
But a short explanation that the trust operates a central estates function and how it is funded may satisfy that part of the requirement, and still say nothing worth reading about the buildings. Not a breach. Just a missed chance to answer a question that is now being asked in public.
Better to have that conversation with finance this autumn than in front of a blank template in January. What is actually in the central estates line — maintenance, compliance, staff, software? If you had to show how it relates to each academy, could you? Whether those costs sit in a spreadsheet or in a report on your premises management software, someone needs to be able to answer that, and to make it make sense to a reader outside finance.
The DfE is not about to publish your boiler schedule. It is about to ask you to explain the model. If the buildings and the numbers have never quite been joined up, this is the document where that shows.
Statlog....more than just compliance and premises software.