He stole £200,000 from a college for 16-year-olds. Now he is banned from schools for life
What happened
The government has barred a former school finance chief from working in education, more than a year after he was jailed for stealing from the students in his care. Olakunle May Emiola Oluwadare, also known as May Dare, was chief financial officer at Big Creative Academy in east London. It is a free school for 16 to 19-year-olds, training young people for careers in the creative industries. Over half of its students qualified for free school meals. Between 2018 and 2021, he stole £200,000 from it. He also falsified a Disclosure and Barring Service check, the criminal record check used across education, to hide a previous police investigation. That is how he got the job in the first place. The fraud was uncovered in late 2021. He was sentenced in April 2025 to 32 months in prison, of which he would serve around half before release on licence. In September 2026, the government issued what is called a Section 128 direction. It bars him from any role running a school, for good. The story was reported by Schools Week on 11 September 2026.
Why this matters
It is easy to read £200,000 as an abstract number. It helps to translate it. According to the school, that sum could have covered two teachers' salaries for three years. It could have paid for mental health counselling, hardship bursaries and student trips. At a college where more than half the students are from low-income families, hardship bursaries are not a nice extra. They are the difference between finishing a course and dropping out. The judge, Alex Gordon, said the fraud had a serious detrimental effect on both the school and its principal, Sacha Corcoran. She described many sleepless nights spent questioning her own judgement. That detail is worth sitting with. Fraud of this kind does not only remove money. It damages the people who trusted the person doing it, often for years afterwards. There is a systems point too. The falsified DBS check is arguably the more alarming part of the story. Safeguarding in English schools rests heavily on that check working. When someone gets past it, the question is not just what they did, but how the check failed.
What the evidence actually says
The facts here are settled in a way that most news stories are not. This went through a criminal court, a conviction was recorded, and a sentence was passed. There is no competing version. What is worth examining is the timeline, because it says something about how the system works. The fraud ran from 2018 to 2021. It was discovered in late 2021. Sentencing came in April 2025. The ban from working in schools came in September 2026. That is roughly eight years from the first theft to the professional ban. Between conviction and ban alone, nearly eighteen months passed. That gap is not unusual, and it is not necessarily wrong. Section 128 directions follow their own process, and people are entitled to make representations. But it does mean there is a window during which a convicted person is no longer in prison and not yet formally barred. It is also worth being proportionate. Serious fraud in academy trusts is rare. There are thousands of trusts and the overwhelming majority handle public money carefully. Cases like this make the news precisely because they are exceptional, and that is a point often lost in the retelling.
Practical advice
If you are a governor or trustee, this is the useful part. Check that no single person can both authorise and execute a payment. Separation of duties is the single most effective control against this kind of fraud, and it is the one most often quietly abandoned when a school is short-staffed. Make sure someone independent of the finance team reviews bank statements, not just the management accounts prepared for you. Verify DBS checks at source rather than accepting a copy. A document handed to you by a candidate is not evidence. If you are a parent, you are entitled to see your school's annual accounts. Academy trusts must publish them. You do not need a reason to look. And if you work in a school and something about the finances does not sit right, raise it. Every trust must have a whistleblowing policy, and the Education and Skills Funding Agency accepts reports directly. In this case, the discovery started somewhere. It usually does.
What to know
Olakunle Oluwadare, former chief financial officer at Big Creative Academy in east London, stole £200,000 from the school between 2018 and 2021 and falsified a DBS check to conceal a previous police investigation. He was jailed for 32 months in April 2025. In September 2026 the government issued a Section 128 direction barring him from running schools. The money could have funded two teachers for three years at a college where over half of students receive free school meals. The case is rare rather than typical, but it points at two controls worth checking in any school: separation of financial duties, and verifying criminal record checks at source rather than accepting copies. Sources: Schools Week, 'Jailed academy finance boss banned from running schools after £200k fraud', 11 September 2026, https://schoolsweek.co.uk/olakunle-may-emiola-oluwadare-dare-jailed-academy-finance-boss-banned-from-running-schools-after-200k-fraud/ ; Department for Education, Section 128 directions guidance, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/section-128-direction-prohibition-from-management-of-an-independent-school ; Disclosure and Barring Service, https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/disclosure-and-barring-service This article is for general information and does not replace advice from a doctor, pharmacist or other qualified healthcare professional, or from a qualified legal or financial adviser.
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