Almost 100 academy trust bosses are paid eye-watering salaries of more than £200,000, prompting calls from governors for an NHS-style executive pay framework.

Schools Week’s annual investigation into chief executive pay – which analysed almost 1,100 trusts – also found 90 per cent of those above the £200,000 threshold were given rises and that six trust chiefs were paid more than £300,000 last year.

Only a quarter of the top earners were women.

Sam Henson, the deputy chief executive of the National Governance Association, said the findings reflected a “stubbornly entrenched” gender pay gap at the top, and a “widening disparity” between the earnings of CEOs and their workforces.

“That is not just an optics problem but a bigger, as yet unanswered question lurking over the sector – does the current approach to MAT exec pay really reflect the values of equity and organisational culture we need it to reflect?

“I think the answer is no. Both boards and executives should be asking what their own pay trajectories signal to the teachers and support staff on whom every trust depends.”

The £300,000 club grows

There are now six members of the £300,000 club, according to our analysis, up from four last year.

Harris Federation’s Dan Moynihan topped the pay charts – as he has done since Schools Week started its annual audit.

He earned between £530,000 and £535,000 in 2024-25 following a £15,000 rise. He is the only leader to earn more than £400,000.

Moynihan was followed by Leigh Academies’ Simon Beamish and Brampton Manor’s Dayo Olukoshi. They received at least £380,000 and £350,000 respectively.

Accounts for the Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust suggest Hugh Hegarty, its former chief executive, pocketed between £320,000 and £330,000 last year, an increase of £105,000 (49 per cent). All trusts were approached for comment.

In all, 88 trusts paid their chief executives more than £200,000 last year, 24 more than 12 months earlier. On average they each had 17 schools on their books.

Analysis by the Kreston group of accountancy firms earlier this year showed the average salary of an executive running large MATs – those with more than 7,500 pupils – crossed the £200,000 mark “for the first time”.

Those in the biggest chains received an 8.2 per cent hike.

But Kreston noted the “overall movement and range” in pay across all trust types was “not significantly different to previous years”.

Our investigation found 27 (31 per cent) of the trusts paying their executives more than £200,000 had 10 schools or fewer, broadly in line with 12 months ago.

Single-academy trusts

Four were single-academy trusts (SATs). The Flagship Learning Trust was again the highest-paying SAT, with Martin Haworth making between £280,000 and £285,000.

Trust accounts said he “voluntarily rejected an incremental increase to his pay”.

However, a “cost-of-living increase was applied in accordance with the national school teachers’ review body report”. Flagship declined to comment.

At the Carlton Academy Trust, which has eight academies, Adrian Kneeshaw was paid £285,000, up £25,000 on 12 months earlier.

A spokesperson said the figure had been “distorted” as it “contains remuneration for external consultancy and school improvement work” and he had a higher basic wage because he did not belong to the Teachers Pension Scheme.

The “true” number “would be below £200,000”, which was “excellent value considering the high degrees of deprivation facing our schools and outstanding financial and academic performance of the trust”.

Ninety per cent of the trust chiefs on more than £200,000 received pay rises.

Just 27 per cent were women, up from 22 per cent the year before. All members of the £300,000 club were men.

Will Jordan, the founder of finance firm IMP Software, said his analysis of more than 400 MATs showed “male and female leaders in comparable roles are paid at broadly similar levels”. But there was a “clear gap in who gets to lead the largest trusts”.

“Among CEOs, women hold 59 per cent of roles at the smallest trusts but just 25 per cent at the largest.

“The pay picture is encouraging, but the representation data raises a question the sector should be asking: why does the proportion of women in senior leadership fall as trusts get larger?”

‘Follow the NHS’

Henson urged the government to explore a “framework that by definition builds in limitations as well as progressions”. Its introduction “is now more than compelling”.

“The NHS operates a very senior managers’ pay framework, banded by organisational size, with clear thresholds and central approval above them.

“It isn’t a perfect model, and any equivalent for academy trusts would need to be carefully and distinctly designed. But the principle is sound.”

The pay of some trust leaders did fall last year.

Estelle Macdonald, of the Hull Collaborative Academy Trust (HCAT), was paid a maximum of £170,000, having previously earned up to £250,000.

This is the least she has been paid since 2019. The trust was approached for comment.

The pay of high-profile leader Tom Rees, of the 45-school Ormiston trust, fell slightly from £202,000 to just under £199,000. Over the financial year, he was named a government tsar to oversee reforms to make mainstream schools more inclusive.

It was also announced last month that he will co-chair an expert panel to develop packages underpinning education, health and care plan reforms and new national inclusion standards. Ormiston was approached for comment.

‘Enormous’ pay packets

Excessive trust pay has come under renewed criticism, with the Green Party’s Zack Polanski warning at the National Education Union conference last month of a “fragmented system with poor accountability, allowing academy CEOs to be paid enormous salaries”.

Just a few days later, Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the NASUWT teaching union, attacked chief executives making more than £250,000 a year, “significantly more than the prime minister”.

He claimed some were sitting “atop ‘empty’ academy trusts, claiming large salaries while managing relatively low numbers of pupils”.

Others were “presiding over trusts failing so heinously that we are stepping in to protect teachers and pupils through industrial action”.

Average pay across the 1,084 trusts we analysed stood at £142,000, compared with £135,000 the year before.

Leora Cruddas, of the Confederation of School Trusts (CST), noted the “median pay for a secondary headteacher last year was £117,601 and the top of the maintained school pay range for heads is £153,490”.

“In that context, an average CEO pay of £142,000 indicates that trust boards are taking seriously their duty to set pay that is appropriate, and that reflects the size and complexity of each individual trust.”

Greater trust focus

In its schools white paper, released two months ago, the government said some academy chains had signed off on “high salaries”.

It vowed to “tighten” rules in the academy trust handbook by requiring wage hikes to be “proportionate and justified”. It hoped this would “prevent excessive increases for individuals carrying out broadly similar roles”.

Ministers had already tightened rules to ensure the whole trust board – rather than smaller committees of trustees – agreed executive pay.

Sharon O’Ryan, of salary advisers Pay in Education, said the changes had resulted in trusts focusing “more on the processes for determining executive pay and for managing pay progression”.

In particular, they had been “documenting evidence around their decision-making, as well as benchmarking the salaries to avoid becoming outliers. And if they are, they document the rationale and provide evidence to support why that may be the case.”

Secret pay crackdowns

The government’s last CEO clampdown, published in 2024, named and shamed the 37 leaders it previously wrote to over their pay in 2021-22. All the trusts were “found to be compliant”.

Twenty-eight have bumped up their chief executive’s pay since being quizzed by officials, our analysis suggests.

Through freedom of information, the DfE said it has since conducted two more clampdowns, based on figures from 2022-23 and 2023-24.

However, officials would not disclose which trusts it wrote to, or the methodology it used to identify the outliers, as it intended to publish the details “before the end of the current academic year”.

37 trusts named and shamed in new ‘outlier’ CEO pay crackdown

While the DfE has published information on academy executive pay, it hasn’t published similar information on local authority-maintained schools – even though it collects this data.

When asked for the earnings of the 10 highest earners in council-run schools, officials said that sharing the information would “contravene a number of the data protection principles” and “would be regarded as ‘unfair'”.

This is despite maintained schools having to publish the salary bands of employees earning over £100,000 on their websites.

Three-quarters raise pay

Across the 1,084 trusts we analysed, executive salaries rose in 798 (74 per cent).

The St Oscar Romero Catholic Academy Trust handed out a £140,000 increase, with David Garrido, who resigned last June, given a minimum of £250,000. The trust was approached for comment.

Pepe Di’Iasio of the Association of School and College Leaders said the findings suggested “a mixed landscape, which is to be expected with there being no national framework for CEO pay and decisions being left to individual trusts”.

Just 9 per cent of the academy chains we analysed cut pay, with the largest drop at Telford City Technology College Trust Limited.

Kevin Satchwell, its former chief executive, earned £320,000 to £330,000 in 2023-24. But latest accounts suggest his successor, Ian Rawlings, was paid a minimum of £170,000 last year.

Di’Iasio added: “With the size, shape and context of trusts varying widely and changing all the time, leadership structures are also regularly shifting as roles and responsibilities evolve.

“When this happens, it may well be necessary to adjust salaries accordingly. In times of tight financial constraints, the most important thing is that trust boards are able to demonstrate good value for money.”

£200,000 outliers

Our outlier analysis – which calculated the expected pay for leaders based on pupil numbers – showed 22 per cent paid their chief executives at 15 per cent or more over expected levels. This is broadly in line with last year’s figure (23 per cent).

Once again the biggest outlier was Brampton Manor, which runs two Newham schools in east London. The analysis suggested a trust of its size would usually pay its leader about £148,000, more than £200,000 less than Olukoshi received.

The New Vision Trust was one of four that paid its leader more than double expected levels. Shahed Ahmed, its chief executive, said the five-school chain “commissioned an independent salary assessment” when it was formed in 2018.

Since then, it had “increased by no more than the annual national pay award for teachers”. He was also responsible for “functions that [would] be typically carried out by a wider team in other trusts” and oversaw maths and English hubs.

Twenty-four per cent were paid at least 15 per cent less than expected levels, down from 27 per cent the year before.

Despite this, Kreston analysis suggested leadership costs grew more slowly than overall staff costs per pupil in MATs. In the largest chains, the gap was over 15 per cent.

“For all the hyperbole that accompanies headlines around CEO salaries, the data suggests that large MATs are significantly out-performing other trusts when it comes to the cost of leadership,” Kreston said.

‘Careful balance’

Unsurprisingly, those in the bottom five for pay per pupil were among the country’s biggest trusts. The smallest MAT of them oversaw 39 schools.

The lowest-paid leader by pupil was again Jon Coles, of United Learning, who earned £4.68 for every child across his 92 schools. Our outlier data suggested he should have been paid £506,000.

Oasis Community Learning’s John Barneby also featured in the bottom three.

An Oasis spokesperson said its “approach to remuneration reflects a careful balance between attracting the experienced leadership required to run a large and complex trust, and staying true to our values of equity, justice and responsible stewardship”.

Our figures suggest Amanda Nicholson, of the Kings Academy Trust in Manchester, was the best-paid trust boss per pupil (£313.65). Three of the five schools her organisation ran last year were either special or AP settings.

Nicholson stressed hers “isn’t an average CEO role or salary” as she was drafted in to launch the trust and introduce “all the checks and balances”. It was also “deliberately taking on failing schools that [councils] have had serious difficulty with”

“Budgets have gone from £3 million to £20 million per year. The stress is unbelievable.

“The salary I am paid on is just for me and me alone, and I retire in three years. So, it is time limited. The salary scale that has been set for my successor is in the £120,000 [to] £130,000 range.”

Pay gap

Our analysis also suggests the gap is continuing to widen between CEOs and their number twos in the highest-paying trusts.

This grew in 55 (63 per cent) of the 88 paying more than £200,000. It narrowed in 19 (22 per cent).

Henson argued that continued sector growth without a “principled pay structure “is neither sustainable nor governable, and it ultimately undermines confidence in the system that MAT leaders are working hard to build”.

“Boards have both the right and the responsibility to set competitive executive pay, and significant, attractive pay is entirely justified given the complexity and accountability of many of these roles. But ‘reasonable’ needs a reference point and the sector doesn’t yet have one.”