The government has outsourced decision-making on school leadership pay to academy trust boards. We see the results

There seems a compelling case for a national pay structure for academy executives, given that this operates for school-level professionals. But would any minister be brave enough to preside over the inevitable pay cuts, in some high-profile cases, that would follow?

 

What would happen if the government were to introduce a national pay structure for those in charge of multi-academy trusts?

It is a worthwhile question to ask, and perhaps a useful thought experiment. For the 21^st century breed of school administrators, working within academy chains, are now the only part of the teaching profession in England not operating to a national framework setting out their pay and conditions.

The leaders of England’s big two teaching unions told me, for a story published yesterday, that just such a national pay structure for academy executives should be introduced.

So, what would happen, if the government did this? Would the ceiling of such a structure extend sufficiently to allow Sir Daniel Moynihan, long-serving chief executive of England’s second-largest academy chain, the Harris Federation, to continue to take an annual pay-and-pensions package of £620-£630,000? 

Would the government allow a further seven – seven! – unnamed people at Harris to receive at least £250,000 each in pay and pensions per year? Especially given that there are questions over whether these executives are even required to do much work during the 13 weeks of school holidays? 

Would it allow the leader of two schools in East London, run by the Brampton Manor Trust, to continue to be paid around £355,000 in salary alone? 

Would an unnamed person at the Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust have been allowed pay of around £325,000 last year. 

Or the leader of a single-academy trust, Flagship Learning, to take a salary of around £283,000 – seemingly a pay uplift of more than £130,000 per year to run this school, simply because it is an academy, rather than a local authority maintained institution, where headteacher pay generally stopped shy of £148,000 last year? 

More broadly, would such a nationally-set structure allow scores of academy trust leaders to be paid more than the person overseeing schools for England’s largest local authority – even though they head organisations far smaller than he does? 

I think these questions answer themselves. Ministers would not be able to defend a structure allowing such largesse, if they actually had to take responsibility for it, and defend it in public, themselves.

But introducing such a national set-up, which would inevitably feature lower pay ceilings than the pay packages mentioned above, would provoke shrieks of outrage from any chief executive facing a potentially hefty pay cut as a result, no doubt led by the Confederation of School Trusts.

However, ministers now do not have such a problem, since they have effectively outsourced decision-making on school administration pay to individual academy trust boards.

As long as each board takes pay decisions which it believes to be defensible – even if, as is some of the cases above – this seems highly dubious when subjected to informed public opinion, then really, it is case of anything goes on executive pay within the schools sector in England. And so we see pay for academy leaders continuing to far outstrip the position for the administrative system it is meant to be replacing: the local authority sector.

A vivid example of this was provided yesterday. I had followed up on a story I ran last month, which had revealed that the person now responsible for supervising academies across London for the Department for Education had had, in her previous role as chief executive of the Mulberry Schools Trust in East London, one of the fastest-rising pay packages of any trust leader over the previous three years. 

Vanessa Ogden’s salary had risen by around £83,000 between 2021-22 and 2024-25, roughly a 54 per cent increase, with her employers’ pensions payments having roughly doubled, leaving her with a total pay and pensions package in the region of £300,000, to run a group of schools well outside the largest 100 academy trusts in England. How had this been possible?

The trust told me at the time of the original story that her pay had been rigorously benchmarked. So I asked, under Freedom of Information, for the benchmarking report.

This was duly released. But, as my story revealed yesterday, sadly I think the exercise was anything but rigorous.

Most glaringly, a key part of it was that the trust had sought to set an upper limit for Dr Ogden’s pay based on a list, published in Schools Week, of what the highest-paid 20 people in the academies sector received. With there being approaching 2,500 academy trusts in England at the time, you can see how skewed this sample was, and how unrepresentative it was, even of an academies sector which of course is well-known for pay inflation at the top.

Either the exercise had been deliberately set up to push Dr Ogden’s salary towards the top of that seen in terms of academy leadership across England – in which case it succeeded, with her package as of last year sitting just outside the top 30 last year according to one recently-published list. This was despite Mulberry, again, not being a large trust. Or it was carried out with a lack of basic rigour, or an understanding that if you benchmark against the very best-paid, you are going to produce a skewed result because the exercise is not reflecting the sector as a whole.

Again, though, looking at what the DfE says on how trusts should behave, in a field that clearly continues to have a lot of potential to generate controversy, perhaps all of this is seen as fine.

Its guidance “Setting executive salaries: guidance for academy trusts” makes the point that “academy trusts are free to set their own executive salaries”. 

It adds: “This places an even greater responsibility on the board to ensure that the use of public money represents the best value for money.”

Given where we are now, as set out above and specifically because we have an alternative system for school administration – local authorities – which demonstrably are spending money in this field more efficiently, in paying their managers less, per pupil, than do multi-academy trusts – it seems to me that the boards system is clearly failing, in this regard.

It could be argued that, in the Mulberry case, that DfE guidance, at least as it currently exists – the latest version was updated last November – may not have been followed.

Specifically, the guidance highlights the DfE’s Academy Trust Handbook, which in turn states that academy trusts’ pay policies must include “a basic presumption that executive pay and benefits should not increase at a faster rate than that of teachers, in individual years and over the longer term.”

Mulberry’s own benchmarking exercise noted that its pay policy did include exactly such a provision. But there was no indication that this had been weighed when reaching the recommendation to increase the CEO’s pay in the way that it did.

With Dr Ogden’s total pay and pensions package having increased by at least £100,000 over the above three-year period, or by more than half, and with teachers’ pay and pensions not rising nearly so quickly, it is hard to see how that policy was followed.

Other than this, though, the current DfE guidance appears suitably hands-off that high pay rises will seemingly continue, without much challenge unless subject to media reporting. It says, for example, that decision-making must be “robust” and “defensible”.

No doubt Mulberry would consider its processes in just such a way, given that it appointed an external consultant to carry out the benchmarking, resulting in an 11-page report. Box ticked, then, you might think, from a regulation point of view. However, scrutiny of the detail sadly suggests the process was sadly far from rigorous, as argued above.

The DfE guidance also seems to underline the unions’ concerns that academy trusts have been in a self-perpetuating “race to the top” on executive pay. This is the case because the guidance talks mainly about trusts needing to benchmark themselves against others within the academy sector. But, in a set-up in which there is general pay inflation for academy leaders, you can see the weakness of such circularity.  Again, why not compare academy leader pay to, say, the per-pupil remuneration of local children’s services directors?

In its recent schools white paper, which somehow envisaged an all-academy-trust system without properly considering the set-up’s multiple current weaknesses, the DfE reluctantly seemed to concede – if only implicitly – that there might be a problem.

It said: “We are…clear that the pay of [academy] trust chief executives must be justifiable, transparent, evidence-based and reflect individual responsibility.” It added: “We will tighten the academy trust handbook by requiring executive pay increases to be proportionate and justified, to prevent excessive increases for individuals carrying out broadly similar roles.”

Responding to yesterday’s Mulberry story, Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, described this proposed change from the government as “woefully inadequate”.

With concerns about high executive pay having been part of the national debate about academies for well over a decade, now, and with the DfE having done little to change the situation and yet to set out any action beyond more guidance, Mr Kebede is right.

There is a case to be made that the government’s general hands-offedness, as revealed by this aspect of the way the academies policy works, resonates throughout its operations.

I am, for example, currently covering two local controversies in which parents have been pleading with the DfE to intervene in two academy trusts operating in England’s South West, because of concerns they have about financial decision-making and their children’s educational experiences, but which have been a struggle because the government’s philosophy is that academy trusts are left to it to manage things as they see fit, more or less whatever the users of the services these trusts provide think.

But the issue of executive pay may be a particularly vivid example of how key decision-making in education has been effectively outsourced to more than 2,000 trust boards.

Somehow, we have ended up with a system whereby the pay of teachers working in schools – in both the local authority and academies sectors, and including school-level headteachers – has a national structure in which a framework is laid down nationally. We have more rigorous pay transparency in the local authority sector* than applies for academy trusts. But, for academy administrators working beyond individual schools, there is no national structure and limited transparency. Thus we see the trends above, which I would argue are often having a corrosive effect on local trust in these organisations.

Beyond the self-serving arguments defending the pay set-up as above, as seemingly embraced by the Confederation of School Trusts, it seems to me that there is no rational case for the above disparity, especially given that we see no particular premium, in terms of quality, between academy trusts as opposed to the local authority set-up.

As a friend put it to me recently, on learning of the Mulberry case: “You can see why the state’s got no money. It’s not checking where it’s going.”

This does seem a classic case of one rule for those at the top, within the public sector, and another for the rank-and-file, which parties of all persuasions might be expected, currently, to be going after.

As it is, in my view the DfE would find it impossible to preside over a national pay structure which allowed some of pay anomalies as set out above. These only continue because decision-making on this has been outsourced.

And yet ultimately the government is responsible for allowing this to have happened. It is in charge of this policy, especially given its position as funder of these public services.

So, time to take some responsibility, ministers?

 

*Anyone paid more than £150,000 within a local authority has to have their exact pay and benefits, and pensions, disclosed against their name and position. Within academy trusts, pay and pensions in £5k bands is only disclosed if an academy executive happens to be a trustee. Thus we have situations where, as in the Harris case, people can be earning much more than the Prime Minister, but we do not know even what role they fulfil in the trust, or what their pensions payments were.