” … in a meeting between union officials and Blue Support executives shortly after the letter arrived [about the award of a cleaning contract for an academy school], a diligent, if overworked, Unison official admitted to being puzzled. Sitting with her back to the window in one of the new-build school’s soulless rooms, Hazel Corby wondered why the lucky company had the same Stockport address as Bright Tribe’s headquarters. She asked how the company had been so swiftly selected after Bright Tribe’s takeover? Who else had a chance to bid for the contract?

‘Joining a multi-academy trust is like marriage without divorce’

The school’s principal didn’t know. An answer wasn’t forthcoming from those representing the company that afternoon, or in the days to come. Bright Tribe later said the question was irrelevant as the contract with Blue Support was made on an interim basis.

But an exchange of business cards between Corby and Blue Support’s human resources manager, Sally Jarvis, gave rather more away. “Sally’s card said Equity Solutions on it,” said Corby.

ES Management Services – where the ES stands for Equity Solutions – is the parent company of Blue Support, of which Dwan’s brother, Andrew, is managing director. Equity Solutions is also Mike Dwan’s main business interest, among 90 other companies of which he is, or has been, a director.

Bright Tribe insists that it has always been transparent about its commercial partners. But, for Corby, Jarvis’s business card was a loose thread that, once pulled, unravelled what she felt was a worrying complex of interconnected commercial and charitable interests.

Here was a financier who had quietly moved into sponsoring academies and with ostensibly philanthropic ambitions. Dwan’s spokesman said that he had donated £3.5m “directly or indirectly” to his academy empire, which included 11 failing schools desperately in need of his resources. The spokesman added that, while Dwan is aware “some will seek to find some ulterior motive for his actions”, he is “involved in the provision of school improvement services for a sole single purpose, to promote better outcomes for our children”.

Yet in 2013-14 alone, it was to emerge, there were nearly £1m worth of payments not recorded in the publicly available accounts by Dwan’s academies to his own private businesses. In 2014-15 another £1.9m in such payments, known as “related party transactions”, were made, albeit this time reported in publicly available accounts following pressure from government regulators.”

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