The DfE is wary of creating a “dependency culture” where academies know they will be bailed out if they run into financial difficulties, a top official has said.

Her comments come amid concerns about a lack of transparency about which academy trusts receive additional funding, and whether they have to pay it back.

Eileen Milner, chief executive of the DfE’s Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), today justified the body’s policy of giving some academy trusts special funding.

Speaking at the Education Show at the ExCel Centre in east London today, she said: “Our job is to ensure that children have access to high-quality education, and there are instances where not writing a cheque is not keeping within the spirit of that.

“We are very, very careful about it, because it’s public money, and I am accountable to Parliament for how that public money is spent.

“We take decisions on exceptional financial support to ministers, but the guiding principle is about children and the education that they receive in the setting that they are in, so I would say to you that it is inevitable that occasionally you will have recourse to this.”

However, she added: “What I wouldn’t want is a dependency culture that people feel that, actually, we are always going to be able to write a cheque.”

The warning comes as more academy trusts are getting into financial difficulty.

Last November, the DfE’s accounts showed the number of academy trusts in deficit was 185 in 2016-17 - an increase from 167 in the previous year.

And last year, the Kreston Academies Benchmark report highlighted inconsistencies about which trusts receive extra money, and whether it was in the form of a loan or a grant.

It said that “rather than funding being equitable, the outcome can be down to the trusts’ powers of persuasion”, and added: “At a time where the official messages are that there is no further funding available, there appears to be a pool of money that can be accessed through skilful negotiation.”

Speaking at today’s event, Mike Pettifer, the ESFA’s director, Academies and Maintained Schools Directorate, said: “We do try and make most of our funding recoverable so we will advance funding and then recover it once their trajectory of the finances has improved, rather than just grant it.

“That’s our default starting position, but you can’t always do that. Sometimes if a trust closes and it’s got debts there’s nowhere to go really.”