Another major academy trust in large-scale redundancy drive

Now Academy Transformation Trust planning to cut frontline and central service jobs.

 

One of England’s larger multi-academy trusts is in the midst of plans to make more than 10 teachers and possibly scores of support staff redundant, across at least 11 schools, in the latest cost-cutting drive to hit the sector.

Academy Transformation Trust (ATT), which runs 21 schools and a further education college from its base in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, appears to have been under pressure from the government to address a financial deficit, with redundancies among both central and school-based staff now in the offing.

It is the latest trust to move towards redundancies, with Education Uncovered having reported in detail on plans for more than 40 job cuts at the south London-based Harris Federation, and with another large trust, Oasis Community Learning, having last week also been reported as making cutbacks. 

However, unlike Harris, ATT has been going through a formal consultation process at trust level with its staff unions, and has also included its central operations within the scope of its plans.

The background

ATT was contacted in February by the Department for Education, this website understands, over its financial position. Its “restructuring” plans, which were initiated in March, follow warnings in its last set of accounts about pressures on its budget.

The trust had reported an “in-year deficit” of £635,000 in 2023-24, and an overall “accumulated income reserve” of just £983,000, although “cash balances” were reported as at £3.6 million. Both of these figures are below the trust’s target of holding five per cent of its annual income, which last year was £90 million, in reserve.

Its accounts, signed off last December, stated: “The level of reserves are below that which the trust would ideally like to hold (which would be a minimum of 5% of annual income). ATT has identified areas that have caused overspends in the last two years – relating to staffing, alternative provision, energy, estates and contracts that were not value for money – and is confident steps and measures it has introduced to tackle these…will achieve financial turnaround during 2024-25 and in subsequent years.”

The accounts also stated that during 2023-24, ATT had undertaken “redundancy processes across a number of its academies, and this work enabled ATT to set a surplus budget for 2024-25”.

Education Uncovered understands that staff at the trust have also been told by ATT, during the redundancy consultation process, that the trust is facing: a reduction of 250 pupils (out of a total pupil roll of 11,762 as of the last published census in January last year); an increase of just 0.5 per cent in its core general annual grant funding, which the trust stresses is a real-terms cut; and “rising operational costs across the board, including energy and staffing”.

The plans

The NASUWT union calculates that 13.8 full-time equivalent teaching posts are to be lost across eight schools. Further analysis by Education Uncovered, based on detailed “restructuring” consultation documents for nine schools, shows that at least 63 support staff roles, including teaching assistants, midday supervisory assistants and some special educational needs and disabilities support positions, are in line to be cut.

The ATT’s academies are sprawled across different parts of England’s middle: 10 schools in Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Thurrock, two in Nottinghamshire, and nine in the West Midlands local authorities of Sandwell, Staffordshire, Stoke-on-Trent, Walsall and Warwickshire.

The consultation document for one school, Mildenhall College Academy in Suffolk, states that cuts are being made even though it is a “large and growing secondary academy,” though with a deficit forecast to be “in excess of £200,000” in 2025-26.

The trust has also said that several “central roles” – not connected to individual schools – have also been identified as “at risk through the consultation process”. These include five finance assistants, five human resources assistants and two “specialist roles”.

The NASUWT has argued that ATT has not provided an acceptable rationale for its redundancy plans, with the union stating in its consultation response that the clear aim of the move was to increase the trust’s reserves, and that that, as an objective on its own, was unacceptable.

A union source highlighted the fact that, unlike at England’s second-largest academy chain, Harris, ATT has at least been including central staff – rather than those only based within individual schools – in the scope of its cost-cutting drive, and that it has been consulting with unions centrally. ATT has also produced an impact assessment of its plans, which union sources say has not been the case with Harris.

However, in ATT’s case the unions nevertheless have had concerns about both the logistical details and substance of this process.

The NASUWT is also concerned that ATT academies have to pay eight per cent of their general annual grant funding as a “topslice” to the trust, with these payments totalling £5.5 million in 2023-24. It is arguing that “if ATT schools did not have to meet any of these costs, then there would be no need for restructuring at all”. It argues that, in the case of Mildenhall, where 3.2 teaching and five support staff roles are in line to be made redundant, the projected deficit “does not warrant the large number of redundancies of teachers and support staff which are proposed”.

The Academy Transformation Trust, which welcomed a new chief executive in Mark McCourt last month after his predecessor Nick Weller resigned last October, has been approached for comment.

The process is currently reaching its conclusion, with staff due to be told of redundancy decisions within the next week.

Nearly a decade ago, ATT also featured in the media over redundancy plans, amid reports that it had told more than 100 staff that they faced losing or having to reapply for their jobs. Up to 32 jobs were in line to be lost as the trust, which also had 21 schools back then, sought savings identified by a union as £500,000, Schools Week reported in May 2016. 

Harris CEO interview

Meanwhile, Harris’s chief executive, Sir Daniel Moynihan, appears still not to be including the federation’s very well-remunerated central team in the scope of potential cost savings, with the 55-school trust having embarked on a process which at its outset sought to make 45 school-based staff redundant.

In an interview with the TES, published yesterday, Sir Dan was asked about his own £515-£520,000 salary, and “whether high salaries [at the trust] make the scale of the redundancies at Harris problematic.” As Education Uncovered reported on Tuesday, Harris had six people paid £200,000 or more in 2023-24, and leads the high pay league table, among the 10 largest trusts, at every benchmark. 

However, Sir Dan responded by arguing that, at 4.6 per cent of its “total budget”, these were “low average costs”.

Yet it is hard to see how Harris’s spending on senior salaries – as opposed to “central costs” as a whole – could be below “average”. Also, 4.6 per cent of what the TES highlights as Harris’s total income in 2023-24 of £364 million* would still equate to a central budget of £16.7m.

That can be set against savings which Harris is seeking to make through its school-level redundancy exercise, which appear to be revealed for the first time in this TES article, at £4 million. Perhaps few would argue that all of that saving should be found from central spending. But critics will wonder why none of this appears to be in the scope of this cost-cutting drive.

*Harris’s 2023-24 accounts list its core income for its “educational operations” as £342 million, with total income overall at £406m. If central costs were actually 4.6 per cent of this total income, that would put the trust’s outlay on central functions at £18.7 million.