Academy trust, where pay of its leader surged at least 14% last year, suspends union rep for speaking out about budget pressures

Hundreds of people sign petition calling for re-instatement of teacher at Excel Learning Trust, formerly South Bank Multi-Academy Trust.

More than 500 people have signed a petition calling for the re-instatement of a union rep who had spoken out about the impact of cutbacks at his multi-academy trust – which saw the pay of its leader jump by at least 14 per cent last year.

Joe Brothers, a young English teacher at Millthorpe School in York, has been suspended after a video he recorded for a National Education Union campaign for greater classroom funding reached the public domain.

The video had given details on the impact of a controversial move by the trust to cut support staff pay, although without revealing which chain it was.

The development is the latest controversy to hit the academy trust Mr Brothers works for, which used to be called South Bank and which runs six schools in the Yorkshire city. It recently rebranded itself as Excel Learning Trust.

South Bank had featured repeatedly on Education Uncovered, and also in other media outlets including Private Eye, including over controversial changes to support staff contracts, the cost of its central management team, and attempts to stop public debate about its operations.

Fresh analysis by this website shows that South Bank/Excel’s spending on central management doubled, per pupil, over a seven-year period to last year.

The trust, which runs two secondary schools, three primaries and a junior school, faced intense controversy back in autumn 2022, when it announced plans to cut teaching assistants’ pay by changing their contracts from 52 weeks a year to term time only. It was reported at the time that this would mean a pay cut for the staff, some of whom worked with children with special educational needs and disabilities, from £18,000 to about £15,000 a year. 

The video

In the two-minute video, Mr Brothers, the school’s NEU rep, speaks about the impact this had, and the overall pressure on school budgets, though he does not mention his employer by name.

He says: “I work in a multi-academy trust. We put all of our support staff from 52-week contracts on to 39-week contracts for the year through a fire and rehire basis, in order to try and tighten those purse strings just about as much as we could, without them absolutely snapping.

“Since then, as a result of that, we’ve just haemorrhaged even more money, because all of the good quality TAs that we had, just left, because they weren’t getting paid enough. As the union, we did what we could at that point.

“But the school absolutely would not budge. And they all got moved down onto 39-week contracts. All of those staff, high quality staff, ended up leaving.

“We have not lost any of the students that require one-to-one TA support. And so, as a result, we’ve been paying through the nose for agency TAs, which has done even more damage to our already thinly stretched budgets.

“The purse strings cannot be pulled any tighter. There is no slack left in them. If our school is to make any more cuts to try and increase the teachers’ wages without any extra funding, that means redundancies, that means more staff having to leave. That means class sizes increasing even more than they already are.”

Mr Brothers says in the video that last year he had to teach a class with 33 pupils in it, at this secondary school, and that he had to bring in extra chairs and tables to try to squeeze them in. Remarkably, he also said the academy trust could not afford reflective coatings to put on the windows of its science department, to stop “dangerous chemicals” from being at risk of exploding in the summer.

The petition

At the time of writing, some 630 people had signed the petition “Demand the Reinstatement of Mr Brothers at Millthorpe School”. The anonymous parent who started it wrote: “As a worried parent whose child is directly experiencing the havoc wreaked by the school budget cuts at Millthorpe School, I can attest to the damage being done. It is rather unfortunate to witness our educators, like Mr Brothers, being penalised for speaking out in acknowledgement of this harm.

“He hasn’t just been a teacher to our children but also an advocate for their rights and welfare. The recent suspension of Mr Brothers by Excel Learning Trust for dissenting against these detrimental budget cuts is an affront to free speech and utterly reprehensible. It underscores an atmosphere where fear supersedes the right to voice out concerns affecting academic welfare. The staff cutbacks and the resultant increase in class sizes have visibly strained the teachers and hindered students’ academic growth.”

In the comments beneath the petition, at least one appeared to be from a current pupil of Mr Brothers. They wrote: “He is one of my English teachers. He is the absolute best and I couldn’t ask for a better one. We need to get him back into this school. He has helped so many people and he has right of speech!...we need to get him back.”

Another wrote: “He’s taught both my kids and they’ve always raved about his teaching style…this [suspension] is a disgrace, simply because he expressed views about the poor state of our education.”

Another said: “My child’s education is being impacted due to school trying to silence someone who’s standing up for what’s right.”

Another said: “So the school are punishing someone for doing what they should be teaching children to do?! Teachers and students should be allowed to stand up and be counted.”

The York Press reported the story yesterday (Wednesday, March 5^th). Mike Kearney, the NEU’s district secretary for York, told it: “The NEU is appalled by Excel Learning Trust’s…actions against our NEU school rep….we are delighted to see a grass-roots community-led campaign emerging to support our rep and the ideals of openness, enquiry and truth…it is not too late for [Excel] to change course.”

The trust was quoted saying: “We cannot provide public comment on any employment matters as these are confidential between individual employees and the trust.”

It is understood that the trust is to decide on Mr Brothers’ future at a meeting later this month.

How did the video become public?

It looks from the video as if it was put together as part of the NEU’s “Fund Fair Pay” campaign, which has sought to put pressure on the government to fully fund the national pay award for 2025-26, and which it also wants raised from the recommended 2.8 per cent rise for teachers.

In it, Mr Brothers signs off with the thoughts: “I had class sizes last year with 33 students in them. I’ve got 32 chairs and tables in my classroom. I have to bring in folding out chairs and tables from the exam hall to use, to fit those students in. I don’t know where we’ll put them, but I know that that’s what it’s going to end up as, if this pay rise is unfunded.”

Mr Brothers does not name South Bank/Excel, with his comments clearly meant to underline the tight financial position this trust found itself, against the national background of pay rises not being funded by the government.

One source suggested that the video might only have been intended for use within the union, rather than for public consumption. I understand that it was officially taken down following the suspension, though was still available elsewhere, online.

The trust’s spending on highly-paid managers

Despite the financial pressures alluded to by Mr Brothers in the video, Excel’s recently-published accounts for 2023-24 show a big increase in not just the pay of its top-paid person, but the next seven highest-paid individuals as well.

Last year, the top-paid person at South Bank received £160-£170,000 in salary. This is roughly in line with that of Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister*. It represents an increase of at least £20,000 on the £130-£140,000 salary for the top-paid person the previous year. That is a rise in the range 14.3 per cent to 31 per cent, depending on where in the published band the actual pay was.

The name of this person is not disclosed, since academy trusts only have to do so if that individual happens to sit on the trust board. In this case, the assumption would be that it relates to Mark Hassack, Excel’s chief executive, who does not sit on the board.

The accounts also show that South Bank’s second-top paid person in 2023-24 received £140-£150,000, an increase of at least £40,000 or 40 per cent compared to the £90-£100,000 for the second-top-paid person in 2022-23; and the third-top was on £100-110,000, compared to £90-£100,000 the year before.

This means the total salary bill for the three top-paid people in the trust rose from £310-340,000 in 2022-23 to £400-430,000 in 2023-24, a rise of at least 18 per cent.

The latest accounts also show that five further people were paid £80-£90,000 in 2023-24, with their equivalents the previous year on £70-£80,000.

The trust spent £1.29m overall on its “key management personnel” in 2023-24, which was a 12.4 per cent increase on the previous year.

Comparison with spending, versus previous years

Remarkably, Excel Learning Trust’s spending on its central management has continued on a steep upward trend, nearly two years after this website highlighted how it had already climbed sharply in the previous years.

In 2023-24, the-then South Bank spent £1.3m on its central team: its “key management personnel,” in the language of academy accounts. This is only a small trust, its 3,229 pupils equating to only roughly the size of two large secondary schools. Yet its “key management personnel” includes Mr Hassack as chief executive, a director of human resources, a director of business services and a chief finance officer, as well as, again in the words of the accounts, “executive principals, principals [and] heads of school”.

That central management spend amounted to £400 for each of those pupils last year.

This is an increase of 39 per cent, compared to the £287 per pupil that was being spent by the trust only two years ago, in 2021-22, according to its accounts of that year**.

Going further back, in South Bank’s first full year of accounts, 2016-17, it was spending less than a third in total on key management personnel, at £353,000. Admittedly, the trust was only just over half its current size then, at 1,760 pupils. But this worked out at central management spending of the comparatively small figure of £201 per pupil.

This means central management spending, per pupil, at this trust which cut pay for teaching assistants, doubled over the seven-year period from 2017 to 2024.

This saga continues to contribute to questions as to whether the academies structure is the most efficient use of tight resources in education.

 

*Sir Keir is on £172,153 for 2024-25.

** The 2021-22 accounts do not list as many people as “key management personnel”, with only the CEO, headteachers, heads of school and chief finance officer listed as paid members of this team. So, by 2023-24, executive principals, principals, a director of human resources and a director of business services were included in that categorisation, and thus counted in the total key management costs.

Whether such positions existed previously, and were only counted in 2023-24 as part of this figure for accounts purposes, or did not exist at all, might be key to understanding the degree to which these central cost rises are real or a function of the accounting. It is impossible to know the answer to that from the accounts themselves. As it is, these appear to be stark increases.