Top trust salaries soar to £200K-plus

services within local authorities, who are the equivalent of academy chief executives.

Among those to criticise such a trend is the cross-party House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which has warned that “unjustifiably high salaries [within trusts] use public money that could be better spent improving children’s education and supporting frontline teaching staff”.

trusts – those paying their leadership much more than their peers.

There is just one problem with such an approach, however. What by historical – and perhaps, international – standards were once “outlier” salaries, are now the norm.

COVERING England’s academies sector as a reporter brings with it a ritual.

Every December and January, as academy trust accounts appear on websites, we journalists scan through as many as we can, seeking out, among other things, the information on each organisation’s highest salaries.

Since the advent of the academies policy in 2002, this exercise has ended in a familiar place, with endless stories about sky-high remuneration packages for those we must now call chief executives, and sometimes others within academy trusts of various sizes.

It is clear that such salaries can dwarf those that had been available to head teachers before multi-academy trusts came into being, and also those of directors of children’s

Between 2017-19, the Government was at least giving the impression of trying to address this issue. Ministers said that trusts paying salaries higher than that of the Prime Minister – at the time around £150,000 – should only happen in “exceptional” circumstances. And officials wrote to trusts paying at least two people £100,000 or more, or one on £150,000-plus, asking them to explain themselves.

However, this drive has petered out. In 2020, the Department for Education held back on publishing a list of trusts it had written to about high pay, after a challenge from the academies sector on the detail of the figures. The letters seem to have stopped ever since, although Schools Week reported in February that there was to be a fresh “crackdown” on high pay. This, it said, would focus on “outlier”

For, five years after that attempted clampdown on £150,000-plus salaries, figures much higher than this have become standard among England’s larger trusts. By my calculations, 13 of England’s 20 largest trusts paid an employee at least £200,000 in 202122, with top pay averaging £223,000. This was a 12 per cent rise in four years, compared to only eight per cent among experienced classroom teachers across England.

A focus on outliers will affect very few people in this scenario, then, with perhaps only Sir Dan Moynihan, the £455-£460,000 leader of the Harris Federation (set up by the Conservative donor and peer Lord Harris of Peckham), likely to be the subject of any polite request for information from the DfE.

And yet the PAC’s warning would still seem powerful. A national pay structure for academy trust leaders – capped at figures more in line with ministers’ 2017-19 expectations – would appear long overdue.