LTIMELINE OF EVENTS

October 2012: Whistleblower contacts the Department for Education (DfE) to raise concerns about the Kings Science Academy.

January 2013: The DfE’s internal audit investigation team is sent into the school.

April: The DfE telephones Action Fraud call centre to report allegations of fabricated invoices at the school. The matter is wrongly recorded as an information report but nobody realises it at this point.

June: The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau realise the matter has been wrongly recorded as information and should have been filed as a crime to investigate, but they do not reclassify it.

September: The DfE ask for an update from Action Fraud and are told that the matter has been dealt with as an information report and will not be investigated unless it is reported as a crime. The DfE does not challenge this or file a new crime report.

October: The findings of the DfE’s audit investigation into the school are leaked to Newsnight. This is the first time the case has been in the public domain.

November: Action Fraud apologises to the DfE for wrongly recording the case as an information report. It is then passed to West Yorkshire Police.

November: The Yorkshire Post reveals the DfE had already been told by Action Fraud in September, six weeks before Newsnight, that the matter was only being dealt with as information.

January 2014: The Yorkshire Post reveals confusion over who had been the school’s chairman of governors in 2011/12. The DfE say they were wrongly told by the school that Tory vice chairman Alan Lewis was but in fact nobody was in place for its first year.

January: School principal Sajid Raza is arrested by police investigated alleged fraud and released on bail.

January: Bradford MPs David Ward and George Galloway claim the DfE has attempted to cover up the alleged fraud for political reasons.

March: Ofsted call for new leaders to be brought in and a new interim head is appointed.