Created: 13th August, 2025
Robert joined Barker in 2002 and is a Partner based in our Braintree office. A Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, he has over 20 years’ experience of all core building surveying services and provides strategic estates advice to key accounts in the education, commercial, ecclesiastical and public sectors.
An education specialist, he provides the following services: estates and energy strategy, asset management planning, project management and capital funding applications.
Robert works closely with clients to plan and implement energy efficiency and sustainability strategies to save money, reduce carbon emissions and meet ESG objectives.
As a RICS Certified Historic Buildings Professional he provides conservation consultancy for clients with listed and historic buildings.
Robert is an experienced APC Assessor and Chairman and is also an external examiner for Anglia Ruskin University
As a Partner Robert leads the Business Development and Marketing function at Barker, builds relationships with key sector bodies and helps steer the strategic growth of the company.
Email: rgould@barker-associates.co.uk
Tel: 01279 648057
In 2020, the ESFA [1] confirmed in its guidance note that Academy Trusts fall within the scope of the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting requirements of The Companies (Directors’ Report) and Limited Liability Partnerships (Energy and Carbon Report) Regulations 2018.
The Department for Education (DfE) issued updated SECR guidance in July 2025, including new conversion factors for greenhouse gas company reporting.
This briefing note provides answers to some key concerns and provides guidance on how to efficiently capture and report your energy usage and carbon output.
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Academy Trusts are not the only organisations impacted by Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting. The legislation is designed to encourage all public sector bodies and private sector company boards to think about their carbon footprint and make changes to their operations in order to support the UK in achieving its target of Net Zero by 2050.
The “rule of thumb” is that if you are a Trust with over 2 secondary phase academies or 5 primary phase academies, you will need to report in your accounts on your carbon footprint, as you will have assets worth £18 million and have a headcount of over 250 staff. Every Trust will have to confirm this based on its own circumstances.
There is no separate report to submit. Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting is part of your audited accounts submission. It will need to be completed in time to submit with your accounts to the DfE as detailed in the Academies Accounts Direction.
In many ways, this is very simple. For gas and electricity, you can take a meter reading at the start of the year on the 1st of September and again at the end of the year on the 31st of August. And multiply the kWh reading by the relevant amount of CO2 per kWh.
However, in our experience, some Trusts will have over 150 separate energy meters, and capturing data can take a lot of time and resources. Smart metering will help with this, especially if you have all your gas and electricity with a single supplier. There are alternative tools available to help with this, such as the EO Portal, which automatically captures and summarises data for reporting purposes.
This is the more complex area from a data collection point of view. Hopefully, many Trusts will be in their second or third year of SECR and thus have started recording mileage with SECR in mind.
If not done already, you may want to start capturing the data by creating some new nominal codes in your chart of accounts. For example, you may want to add the DfE standard template with the following codes:
This would allow you to simply divide the cost of the staff travel by the rate you pay, for example, if you use the standard HMRC rate for mileage under 10,000 miles of £0.45 and your end-of-year expenditure was £4500, you would be able to calculate the mileage travelled in the year as 10,000 miles.
More technical solutions are available for Trust staff who do a lot of travelling, such as the Microsoft Mile IQ app and the Tripcatcher app.
We are aware a number of Trusts use fuel cards for minibuses. In this instance, data should be available from your fuel card account summary. Again, doing this retrospectively may be difficult, but you may currently have a simple mileage log that you get staff to fill in each time they use the minibus.
For Trust vehicles, a way to automate the data capture could be to add a GPS tracker to minibuses, which would automate the data collection process once the initial mileage had been captured.
At this time, it is our understanding that the PFI contractor is responsible for the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting, where utilities are wrapped into the PFI payments, but the responsible body will be responsible for SECR if they pay utilities costs separately from the PFI lease payments.
This is the key focus of the legislation. The formal reporting of your carbon footprint is not an aim in itself. The government is hoping that, by mandating reporting on energy use and carbon, Trusts will start taking definitive action to reduce their carbon footprints.
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[1] The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) closed on the 31st of March 2025. All activity has moved to the Department for Education (DfE).
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