Thirty-seven academy trusts have been named as part of the government’s new ‘outlier’ CEO pay crackdown – but the MAT whose boss earns almost £500,000 a year isn’t one of them.
Schools Week revealed earlier this year that Department for Education would resume its policy of naming and shaming the chains under scrutiny over high wages.
Officials have today released the list of academy trusts written to by the Education and Skills Funding Agency, last November, for having the “highest executive pay”. Letters were sent under the previous government.
They used to write letters to to trusts paying staff more than £150,000, but this has been in limbo since mid-2020.
The new approach instead compares CEOs’ pay with organisations of a “similar size and type”.
To calculate the outliers, the ESFA initially grouped trusts by type and pupil numbers “to minimise bias”.
Officials then worked out those in the top 5 per cent of highest-paid execs overall and “as a proportion of general annual grant funding”.
The new approach aims to ensure “that decisions about pay represent good value for money [and] are defensible relative to the public sector market”.
“We have a duty to ensure that academy trusts, as autonomous bodies, uphold high standards of transparency and accountability,” the ESFA said.
“Compliance with the academy trust handbook (ATH) is a condition of every academy trust’s funding agreement.”
The trusts were asked “for evidence of how, when setting executive pay, the trust complied with conditions set out in the ATH 2023”.
Controversially, the Harris Federation, whose CEO Dan Moynihan is England’s best-paid trust chief, was not among them. Last year, Moynihan’s minimum salary rose for the first time since 2018-19, from £455,000 to £485,000.
The trust has two other unnamed members of staff earning between £230,000 and £250,000.
Here is the full list…
- Aquinas Church of England Education Trust Limited
- Bournemouth School For Girls
- Brampton Manor Trust
- City Learning Trust
- Congleton Primary Academy Trust Limited
- DYRMS – An Academy with Military Traditions
- Elmwey Learning Trust
- Flagship Learning Trust
- Great Heights Academy Trust
- Greater Nottingham Education Trust
- Inspire Multi Academy Trust
- Kingsway Community Trust
- LDBS Frays Academy Trust
- Lion Academy Trust
- Loxford School Trust Limited
- Mayfield Grammar School, Gravesend
- Mother Teresa Catholic Academy Trust
- Northampton School for Boys
- Paradigm Trust
- Queen Elizabeth’s School Barnet
- South Farnham Educational Trust
- St Cuthbert’s Roman Catholic Academy Trust
- St Edward’s College Edmund Rice Academy Trust
- St Joseph Catholic Multi Academy Trust
- Stowe Valley Multi Academy Trust
- Strive4 Academy Trust
- Swift Academies
- The Bishop of Winchester Academy Trust
- The Collegiate Trust
- The Eveleigh Link Academy Trust
- The Inspire Multi Academy Trust (South West)
- The Northampton Free School Trust
- The Premier Academy Limited
- The Ron Dearing UTC
- Wembley Multi Academy Trust
- Willow Tree Academy
- Wilson’s School
I find it intriguing to consider how many of these MAT (Multi-Academy Trust) chief executives have a genuine background in education, particularly those with over 20 years of impactful, life-changing teaching experience. It seems to me that many of these leaders are, unfortunately, contributing to the very issues that plague the UK’s education system today. Their focus appears to be more on the relentless “scramble for certification” rather than on nurturing a truly high-quality educational experience. As a result, we see students graduating with papers that say they are qualified, but in reality, they lack the deep knowledge and skills that true education should provide.
It often feels as though MATs are applying a business model designed to maximize profits rather than one that invests in the actual growth and development of students. It’s a system that, like any profit-driven enterprise, prioritizes quantity over quality, turning out students who are, in many ways, the inferior products of an exploited system rather than the well-rounded, capable individuals they could be.