Academy trust, which forced teaching assistants to take pay cuts, saw its management costs surge almost 50 per cent in five years, fresh analysis shows

A multi-academy trust, which recently asked its teaching assistants to sign new contracts on worse terms and conditions, has seen its per-pupil costs on central management surge by nearly 50 per cent in six years, new analysis by this website has revealed.

South Bank Multi Academy Trust, which runs six schools in York, spent £287 per pupil on nine senior leaders which were listed in its last-published accounts, for 2021-22. In 2017, the cost for its “key management personnel” was £195 per pupil.

Central spending at this trust thus rose 47 per cent, per pupil, over the six years. And further calculation suggests that £300,000 would have been saved by South Bank, seemingly to invest at the chalkface, if it had not seen per-pupil spending on central management climb in this way.

This therefore seems a case study in a wider national picture of management costs in multi-academy trusts seeming to rise, per pupil, as they get larger, as a growing central infrastructure is created. With the trust having been under fire locally for its re-writing of support staff contracts, this feeds into the debate about rising central spending possibly coming at the cost of classroom-level services.

This afternoon South Bank told Education Uncovered that its enlarged central team was helping to improve its schools, so that it could “give the maximum professional and school improvement support to our family of schools and their pupils”.

The detail

 

South Bank MAT was set up with three schools – a secondary and two primaries – in 2016. Two further primaries and a secondary followed over the following three years. As of January 2022, its six schools had 3,306 pupils in total.