MATs with money to spend, just not on teachers

MANY statistics jumped out at me when investigating the incidence of high salaries in academy trusts versus what happens within the local authority (LA) maintained sector.

But one was perhaps most striking. In 2021-22, six of England’s largest LAs, jointly responsible for the education of 481,000 pupils in non-academy schools in their areas, had six people paid £130,000 or more. By contrast, in that year the largest 19 academy trusts, with 474,000 pupils, had 106 people paid £130,000 or more.

There were other staggering figures. Large academy trusts spend eight times as much per pupil on highly paid managers as do England’s largest LAs. Lancashire, England’s largest LA in 2021-22, had only one education official paid £100,000 or more for its 140,000 pupils. England’s three largest academy chains, with 126,000 pupils between them, had 36 people paid at least £130,000. This was uncovered as part of research I carried out for the Campaign for State Education. It begins to tell what I think is a vastly under-reported story within English state-funded education: how recent years have seen the development of a new, often highly paid administrative architecture presiding over state-funded schools.

Where they were once entirely overseen by relatively leanly staffed LA operations, now multi-academy trusts embody what can seem like layer upon layer of central management.

One example recently caught my attention. Overseeing its nine secondary schools spread across Sheffield, Barnsley, Doncaster and Cambridgeshire, the Astrea Academy Trust has a chief executive, a director of secondary, three regional directors, an executive principal for its four Cambridgeshire schools and “national leads” for several national curriculum subjects.

This is in addition to its school-based senior leadership teams and subject heads of departments. Recently, the trust has also been advertising for an up-to-£100,000 director of curriculum and assessment.

Implications seem twofold. First, there are worries about the financial impact in terms of school-level cutbacks. Second, this management regime sits against the backdrop of what unions are criticising as a standardisation of teaching approaches taken by Astrea’s schools, where teachers are told to implement in tightly prescribed detail the techniques of the Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) textbook. “Booklets” are being produced by the central trust, which set out the content of individual lessons so that, as one staff source put it to me, anyone – qualified professional or not – could take a class.

Elsewhere, material from a school within the largest academy trust, United Learning, also suggests it seeks to “embed” standardised approaches to teaching, including TLAC, in the classroom.

While some defend such approaches as ensuring a consistency of teaching which is especially valuable for early career teachers, I wonder if this centralised prescription of techniques is a price being paid for the MAT sector’s high spending on administrators?

For if such centrally directed policies were not being rolled out, how else would this new management architecture be justified?