England’s most well-paid academy leader breaks the �450k barrier

The remuneration of England’s best-paid academy superhead rose again last year, to break the �450,000 barrier for the first time.

Sir Dan Moynihan, chief executive of the Harris Federation, saw his pay and benefits increase from £440-£445,000 in 2017-18 to £450-£455,000 last year – a rise of at least £5,000 or somewhere between 1.1 and 3.4 per cent, the chain’s newly-published annual accounts show.

With an additional £50-£55,000 in employers’ pensions payments in 2018-19 (the same as the previous year), Sir Dan’s pay, benefits and pensions packets is, for the first time, clearly at least half a million pounds.

The increase looks roughly in line with inflation, then. But the fact that his remuneration went up at all, despite Harris having been one of nearly 150 academy trusts to have been challenged by the government to justify any salary above £150,000, seems another interesting commentary on the influence – or lack of it - of regulation.

The latest figures were revealed as Harris, as it had done last year, left it to the final hours of yesterday’s accounts-publishing deadline to disclose its annual financial statements on its website.

Sir Dan’s reported pay in 2017-18 had been the same as the previous year. But this followed years of five-figure rises: back in 2011-12, his remuneration was under £300,000, at £298,362. So the 2018-19 figure represents a 50 per cent rise over seven years.

Going slightly further back, Harris 2008-9 accounts show an unnamed employee and trustee/director– presumably Sir Dan – was paid £216,616 that year. Assuming that was Sir Dan, his pay therefore more than doubled over the ten years to 2019. (Over the same period, the gap between Sir Dan’s remuneration and that of the second-highest paid person at Harris rose from around £40,000 to around £160,000).

Four other £200k-plus leaders at Harris

Yet Sir Dan is far from the only well-rewarded member of the leadership team at the 48-school Harris Federation, which is based in Croydon, south London, with last year’s accounts showing he was, remarkably, one of four of its employees within England’s top 10 best-paid people in education.  

The accounts show little change from that picture, with the second-highest-paid person at Harris in 2018-19 on the same amount as the previous year (which had also made them the second-highest paid in England): £290-£300,000.

Two other Harris senior leaders were paid in the £240-£250,000 range last year and there was another leader topping £200,000 – on £200-£210,000. This means there were five employees paid £200k-plus in 2018-19, which was the same number as the previous year.

A further seven people were paid in the £150,000-£200,000 range (the number was six last year). So that makes 12 people paid £150k-plus at Harris in 2018-19.

Finally, there were an additional 19 employees paid £100-£150,000 (20 the previous year).

This seems to put into perspective DfE attempts, over the last two years, to challenge trusts which have either one person on at least £150,000, or two people on at least £100,000. Harris will point to its exceptional Ofsted record and results as justification for this largesse. But the ministerial drive, which given its timing saw this set of accounts as its first opportunity to yield concrete results, seems at face value to have had little impact here, as was the case, seemingly, in other trusts.

Harris might also point to its brightening financial situation: from a deficit of £2 million in 2017-18, its finances improved last year to post an “operational surplus” of £1.5 million.

Private sponsorship

Perhaps this was helped by a seemingly increasingly active fundraising operation. Harris states that it raised £1.43 million in private sponsorship last year, a statement which seems likely to continue the debate about the blurring of boundaries between state and private provision.

Among the initiatives this sponsorship funded, the accounts say, were “the opening of the UK’s first free for parents full time nursery in Peckham [south London]”, as reported on here; “one-to-one tutoring in ten Harris secondary academies”, “reduc[ing] class sizes in some of our primary academies” – by implication, then, using sponsorship to pay for extra staff; giving bursaries to sixth formers to help fund their university education; funding mental health counselling for pupils; and teaching Mandarin.

Media strategy on knife crime

The accounts also see the federation flagging up its coverage in the media about “youth violence, and in particular gun and knife crime, [which] has continued to be a significant and deeply distressing concern for many of the communities we serve”.

In January last year, for example, the Times (£) ran a feature under the headline “Teenage knife crime: how the Harris academies are fighting back” – with the writer, Andrew Billen, opening his piece with the line “What is surprising is that they want to talk about it” – while last March the Telegraph ran a piece on the subject with three Harris senior leaders, led by Sir Dan, the interviewees.

The accounts state: “We…decided to take a public stance on the issue, engaging with the media on the key issues and being the first schools group in the country to ‘admit’ to the problems associated with it.

“This carried significant reputational risk, particularly locally for our schools, but this was worthwhile to make a meaningful contribution to the debate.”

On a wider front, the last 18 months have not been uncontroversial for the chain, which received its first ever Ofsted report rating at less than good in September following a report which included some serious criticisms including over pupil departures, and a dispute with the inspectorate over the latter’s seeming preference for two-year GCSE courses.

Federation proud of its unique Ofsted record

However, the accounts include a line which flags up the federation’s overall Ofsted record, in terms that would seem at face value to have the potential to rile other trusts.

They state: “By the end of the academic year, 37 Harris academies had been inspected and 28 of these had been rated ‘outstanding’ – the same as the other six largest multi-academy trusts combined.”

The accounts also confirmed the federation’s well-known fairly hard line on union representation, with it spending nothing on “facility time” funding employees to take time out of their normal work duties to perform union duties, in contrast to many other trusts.

Control

Finally, the accounts underscore how one person – the Conservative peer and donor Lord Harris of Peckham – is in ultimately in control of an organisation which now, this document shows, has assets valued at more than half a billion pounds.

In November, Education Uncovered revealed how the federation’s constitution documents show Lord Harris’s position as “principal sponsor” will pass to family members upon his death.

The latest accounts confirm that the current “principal sponsor” – Lord Harris – is the first-named “member” of the trust and has the right to appoint two other members. Members then get to appoint, and dismiss, trustees. So the organisation’s governance is effectively controlled by one person.

With the deadline for 2018-19 accounts having passed yesterday, Education Uncovered will start analysing their contents more systematically. I may well return to those of Harris itself over the coming days.