“Like nothing I’ve seen in decades” Unions lift the lid on Harris redundancy plans

Education Uncovered sets out the detail and controversy around plans by England's second-largest academy chain to cut more than 40 frontline jobs.

 

More than 100 employees of England’s second-largest academy chain took part in redundancy meetings this week, as the Harris Federation launched what unions are describing as the biggest job-cutting exercise of its kind that they can remember.

The move by the south-London based trust to cut jobs without any federation-wide consultation with unions, with no detailed business case and with Harris’s uniquely well-remunerated central senior management team seemingly excluded from any redundancies, has provoked gasps this week.

One union official said the move, which is set to see more than 40 Harris school-level staff lose their jobs in a fast-track process concluding by the end of this month, was the largest set of redundancies they had seen in 30 years’ union work in education.

Here, in this exclusive look at the detail of the proposals, Education Uncovered can reveal:

-The detail of which schools the job losses are set to affect;

-The fact that a Harris secondary which only last week achieved the first “outstanding” Ofsted verdict in its history received notice, on the day the inspection result was announced, that at least eight of its teachers would be made redundant: the highest number across the federation;

-The fact that the cutbacks appear to be occurring uniquely among Harris secondaries, sixth forms and alternative provision, even though Harris’s justification for them involves pressures on budgets which affect all its schools, including primaries;

-Fears that overseas-trained teachers, some of whom were brought to England only recently by Harris to address recruitment shortages, will be the focus of a large proportion of redundancies at a secondary where 25 staff have faced redundancy meetings;

-Information from a union that staff who are on maternity leave, and who are pregnant, are among those at risk of redundancy, as, it said, are at least two workplace union representatives.

The Harris Federation, which is arguing for the frontline cuts on the basis of an “unfunded” teacher pay award by the government, rising national insurance costs and falling rolls at its schools and others across London, does not speak to Education Uncovered.

The detail

Harris runs 55 academies in and around the capital from its base in Croydon, south London. On Tuesday last week, it sent a one-page letter to unions warning of a “Uk-wide issue that schools are experiencing in respect of a challenging financial situation.”

The federation was facing an “unfunded pay rise for teachers of 2.8% and for support staff of 3.2%,” it warned, plus a government increase to employers’ national insurance which was “not fully funded”. And, “like nearly all London schools,” Harris’s academies were “experiencing a significant drop in our rolls resulting from the falling birth rate and therefore we have no extra income to offset costs”.

Two days after the letter was sent, Lord Harris of Peckham, who set up the eponomyously-named federation and who is ultimately in control of it, also warned of the pressure on its budgets, during a speech in the House of Lords. 

The federation, therefore, said its letter, needed to have any teacher redundancies in place by May 31^st. It added: “It is never our aim to lose good and dedicated teaching staff, but the current situation is extremely challenging.”

The federation initially disclosed plans to cut a total of 45 teaching posts across 14 of its secondaries and sixth forms, although a more recent number, provided this week, was 43 posts across 13 academies. No job cuts appear to have been listed across any of Harris’s 19 primary schools.

Individual staff who could be affected were notified last Thursday, with “group meetings” then held with employees on Tuesday this week, followed up by one-to-one meetings for those affected, which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The group meetings were to communicate with individuals who could be affected by job cuts – essentially a pool of people some of whose jobs would need to be cut in order for Harris to reach its required number of reductions in staff.

Although the figure of 45 job cuts overall has already been reported, Education Uncovered can reveal that 103 staff were involved in these “group meetings”.

Job cuts in individual schools

The full school-by-school list of proposed cut positions, and the number of people involved in “group meetings”, accurate as of earlier this week, is set out in the chart below.

School	Number of "redundant roles"	Size of job cut "pool"
Harris Academy Peckham	8	16
Harris Academy Beckenham	7	25
Harris City Academy Crystal Palace	6	8
Harris Academy Greenwich	5	15
Harris Academy Bermondsey	4	19
Harris Academy Battersea	3	8
Harris Academy Riverside	2	3
Harris Academy Chafford Hundred	2	2
Harris Girls' Academy East Dulwich	2	2
Harris Academy/6th form Rainham	1	1
Harris Academy South Norwood	1	2
Harris Aspire Academy	1	1
Harris Academy Orpington	1	1
Totals	43	103

 

Two potential job losses at one additional school, Harris Academy Falconwood, were listed as of earlier this week, but not in later communications.

The move came two months after Harris averted the prospect of possible strike action at 18 of its secondary schools and sixth forms by settling a dispute with the National Education Union, including over the terms of overseas-trained teachers. 

Concerns in individual schools

Harris Academy Peckham has been listed for the largest number of job cuts, at eight, but with the school having officially celebrated a remarkable Ofsted-outstanding verdict – outstanding in all aspects of its provision - on the day that these cuts were unveiled.

The school was the second within the federation to open, in 2003, and has often faced huge challenges, going through highly controversial moves to close its sixth form, and to scrap a series of well-regarded vocational options, back in 2018. It is understood that as an academy the school had never achieved Ofsted’s top grades, with Lord Harris even appearing,* in a debate on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill last Thursday, to suggest that it had never before been rated outstanding “in 75 years” as a school.

Union sources said members at the school were aghast that, having secured this landmark judgement, the reward appeared to be these redundancy meetings.

At Harris Academy Beckenham, where seven jobs are at risk, against the highest “pool” of potentially affected staff at any school – 25 – union sources said it appeared that “the majority of staff at risk are overseas-trained teachers”.

Harris has been in the spotlight over the past year over its recruitment of overseas staff, particularly from Jamaica. The federation recruits them with teaching gaps to fill, but they can be in a vulnerable position, with visas depending on being employed. Education Uncovered understands that some of the affected staff have been recruited only recently.

Overseas-trained teachers (OTTs) who have been placed on the unqualified teacher pay scale have been some of the lowest-paid staff within the federation, which is led by a £500,000-a-year chief executive, in Sir Daniel Moynihan, although the trust agreed to address this issue after the NEU balloted to strike over secondary and sixth form pay and conditions earlier this year. 

Harris Beckenham appears not to have had any acute trouble in recent years with falling rolls, with latest government data showing that as of January last year it was educating 1,228 pupils. This is more than its official capacity of 1,200.

It is clear that, while Harris’s large and very well-remunerated senior central team appear not to have been included in plans for job cuts – at least there have been no announcements about this – the jobs of some middle and even senior managers within its schools are at risk.

A consultation document for affected staff at Harris Academy Bermondsey, where four jobs are at risk and 19 staff were in “pool” meetings, shows that assistant principal and head of year roles are at risk. It proposes reducing the number of assistant principal roles from eight to seven, and those for head of year to be cut from six to five, as well as a reduction in the number of maths teachers from five to four, and that “the role teacher of geography who is the lead practitioner responsible for OTTs, is made redundant”.

At Harris Academy Orpington, a Harris consultation document with staff proposed that a modern languages teacher post be cut. The document stated: “It is felt that, within the current financial limitations, the current staffing provision [with three members of staff in the languages department] does not make the most cost effective and best value use of resources and the Academy would not be able to sustain this level of staffing in the future.

“To ensure the most efficient use of resources, the Academy has re-organized [sic] the curriculum for next year. We have a full time MFL teacher, more than we need. If we make that role redundant, we will be able to continue to teach the curriculum as planned, without adaptation. Making this role redundant would potentially save more than £40k and would not require any moderation at all in other people’s roles or responsibilities and therefore is unavoidable.”

A union source added that, across the federation, “we are aware of a number of members at risk [of redundancy] who are currently on maternity and are pregnant” and that “we are aware of at least two [union] workplace representatives who are at risk of redundancy”.

Federation-wide controversies over this move

Controversy over the federation’s move, which one seasoned union source described as “shocking,” is multi-faceted. But three aspects, which are interlinked, seem particularly noteworthy.

Controversy 1: Executive pay

The first is the scale of remuneration of Harris’s most senior managers, who seem unaffected by these proposed cuts. As Education Uncovered has been reporting for years, Harris pays sector-outlying wages to its executives, headed by but not limited to Sir Daniel’s £515-£520,000 pay plus £80-£85,000 employer’s pension contributions in 2023-24: a total package of at least £600,000.

Last academic year it had six people, including Sir Daniel, on £200,000 or more in salaries alone, and six people- likely to be the same six - on total packages including pensions of at least £250,000 a year. In addition, its total number of people on £150,000 or more – just short of the wages of the Prime Minister – was 17.

While I have yet to do the maths to compare this rate of high remuneration to those of other academy trusts, there are many more £150,000+ salaries at Harris than at any other chain, meaning that its expenditure at this level will be higher, per pupil, than in any other chain, and much higher than within the local authority sector which still oversees nearly half of all schools nationally. If individual Harris teachers are being told that cuts have to be made “to ensure the most efficient use of resources,” critics are likely to wonder why the same efficiency lens is not being trained on central salary expenditure.

That was certainly the view of one staff member at Harris Academy Beckenham, whose thoughts were passed to Education Uncovered.

Of the proposed redundancies, they said: “While such actions are not uncommon in the private sector or in economically distressed institutions, this step is highly unusual for an oversubscribed and ostensibly thriving school. The likely underlying cause may lie in the unsustainable cost structure of the Harris Federation itself…

“In the context of stagnant growth within the Federation, increased employer National Insurance contributions, and growing fiscal pressure, it appears that frontline teaching staff are being targeted for cuts – potentially as a means to protect top-level executive pay.

“If so, this raises serious questions about governance priorities and the Federation’s commitment to delivering high-quality education rather than preserving a corporate-style leadership model.”

One union source added that the federation also had scope to look for savings beyond its staff costs. Harris pays for extensive offices in Croydon, they argued, while other multi-academy trusts are operating more cheaply, from schools. With the federation admitting its own schools are affected by falling rolls, this should free up space for headquarters staff to be operating from individual academies, they argued.

Controversy 2: The way the move is happening

Possibly connected to the concern about central staff spending is the way the redundancies move is being conducted, with union sources aghast that Harris has not undertaken any central consultation with them; not presented any detailed business case detailing the need for the cuts; and not even stated how much money will be saved in total.

Legally, employers have to go into formal consultations with unions whenever more than 20 redundancies are proposed. But, even though there are more than 20 redundancies in total in this case, Harris is not consulting with the unions at a federation-wide level, via a joint negotiating body which involves seven of them.

Instead, it is arguing that this is not legally required, as no individual school has more than 20 redundancies, and legally the unit that matters is the school, rather than the federation as a whole.

Consultations are therefore taking place with employees and their representatives at school level, rather than across the trust.

The lack of central consultation appears to have had concrete effects, at school level. A union source said that full-time union officers were not sent a timetable of the “group meetings” to be held with employees before the redundancy consultation opened, “which would have enabled union officers to make contact with members to arrange representation at the group meetings and individual consultation meetings”.

The federation has also not set out any detailed business case for the cuts as a whole. Its case has been set out only at high level – the pressures on its budgets as detailed in the letter described above – but without stating how much money will be saved by the proposed cuts, or any sense of how a subsequent government decision to fund pay increases for teachers might affect calculations.

The lack of a business case appears to be against Harris’s own “Redundancy and Restructure” policy, which, in a document dated July 2024 stated that any redundancy proposal “must set out “=the business case for the restructure or redundancies”.

It seems possible to wonder if Harris would argue that what it has said about the pressures on its budgets constitute a “business case”. But the unions appear to have a point that it lacks detail, including no information on the scale of savings and how they compare to its overall income and reserves, and no detail on why certain schools have been targeted, and not others.

Harris also says that it follows the so-called “Burgundy Book,” which sets detailed national pay and conditions arrangements for teachers. This also stipulates requirements as to what the employer – in this case Harris – must provide in terms of information to unions. Again, the unions say this has not been followed.

One union source also said as of yesterday that union officers “have asked for a Harris-wide JCNC [Joint Consultative and Negotiation Committee] meeting but this has been refused”. However, as this piece was about to be published, I learnt that the federation had agreed to hold "a special" meeting with the committee, to discuss the redundancies. 

One union source pointed my way towards a redundancy process currently ongoing at another large multi-academy trust, which I will be writing about next week. This has consulted unions centrally. That trust also published an impact assessment document – an exercise which union sources say has also been lacking in the Harris case.

This other trust has also included its central senior management team within the scope of possible job losses.

Union sources wonder if the reason that Harris is not consulting at a federation level with unions, and instead consulting only at the school level, is that to do so would be to bring its central team at least into the question as to whether they could be included in potential cuts.

Controversy 3: Harris’s reserves

The final controversy to highlight is the scale of Harris’s current reserves. Its 2023-24 accounts provide a figure of £21.5 million, which it has as “unrestricted general funds,” with “total revenue reserves” sitting at £28 million.

As the accounts point out, the latter equates to around £500,000 per school, or about 1.1 months’ worth of spending. Academy trust accounts do tend to talk about the organisation needing such a buffer, with Harris’s accounts stating that this is a “sufficient” buffer, with each academy having reserves such that “in unforeseen circumstances the academy will still have the resources” to continue operating.

However, union sources argue that it is situations such as that facing Harris and all schools currently that such buffers are designed to protect against.

There were reports last week that the School Teachers’ Review Body has recommended a pay rise of “close to four per cent” for teachers for 2025-26, and that the Department for Education has said it would not fund even a lower pay rise of 2.8 per cent. 

However, there is no confirmation as yet as to what the final position will be.

Given this uncertainty, and given Harris’s hefty reserves, unions argue that the federation can afford to wait until the final picture is known, before removing staff.

As mentioned, Harris has not put forward any detail on overall savings associated with the redundancies. To use my own rough calculations, if all 45 of the posts were to save on average the £40,000 as set out in the Harris Academy Orpington case above, that would add up to a saving of £1.8 million overall.

With some of these posts affecting school-level senior and middle managers, that seems likely to be a conservative estimate, though. But, even assuming cost savings at double that, at £80,000 each, this would still only add up to £3.6 million. This is only 13 per cent of that 2023-24 revenue reserve buffer as set out in the 2023-24 accounts.

It also compares to a total pay-and-pensions bill for £200,000-plus managers at Harris last year of £3.25 million, and a total outlay for those at the federation who received at least £100,000 in pay and pensions of £22.1 million.

On the decision to cut more than 40 jobs despite the reserves Harris currently holds, one union source said: “There are a lot of academy trusts that are either very close to deficit or maybe in deficit, which are not doing this [going through a large-scale redundancy process] to the same extent.”

Reactions

This source added that Harris’s move was unprecedented, in their experience negotiating in relation to schools and local authorities. This was so both in relation to its scale, and to the fact that the union had chosen to provide so few details, and not to consult at a federation level with unions. Harris, they said, was behaving like a private company which did not recognise unions, rather than as an organisation within the public sector.

They said: “This is not what we are used to in the public sector. By which I do not mean [the fact that there are] redundancies or reallocation of work. It’s the way that it’s being carried out. The refusal to actually have a collective [federation-level] consultation and to provide information by Harris: it is the sort of thing that companies that do not recognise unions get into. For companies that recognise unions, we do expect them to get into consultation, especially if there are a large number of redundancies.

“This is certainly the highest number of redundancies within an employer since I became involved in the union, going back 30 years: it’s the biggest number within an individual employer at the same time.

“There’s no business case, no costing of these plans to cut support staff or teachers, or to fund the teachers’ pay award. There’s no indication that [Harris] is going to present staff with alternatives [to redundancy].”

Another union source said that, with the redundancy process set by Harris to conclude by May 31^st and with two bank holidays and the half-term featuring in that period, “this basically leaves members of staff only 14 days to participate in consultation”.

They added: “It’s premature to be cutting staff when the government has not confirmed what the funding arrangements are going to be [for schools] from September. [Ministers] changed their minds last year and before, so we cannot guarantee what is going to happen. And they have the financial headroom to absorb this uncertainty.

“Even if Harris think they do need to make cuts, they should not be looking at front-line staff, who are under such pressure, to make them. These are the most essential roles in education: teachers and support staff. They should not be bearing the brunt of this.”

Revealing the proposed cuts at Harris on Tuesday, the NASUWT union had described the federation as “seeking to force dozens of teachers from their jobs and using underhand tactics to try and shut out unions from any meaningful consultation process.” Matt Wrack, the union’s acting general secretary, had said: “This academy trust has tens of millions in the bank, pays its boss more than the Prime Minister and yet is seeking to get rid of 45 teachers. There needs to be an immediate halt to the proposed redundancies and a proper collective consultation with NASUWT.”

Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, had said, of the move overseen by Sir Daniel: “Attempts to make financial savings at the coal face [are] outrageous from a man who earns over half a million, has over 46 executive staff earning more than £130,000, with the top 12 of those earning over £200,000 at a combined cost of c£3.2 million.

“Harris is blaming the cuts on unfunded teacher and support staff pay rises for 2025/26. However, the Government is yet to release the School Teachers’ Review Body’s recommendations or confirm funding arrangements for next year. This is truly cart before horse management…Profit and personal gain over teaching standards in our schools will not be stood for.”

As mentioned, Harris Federation does not respond to requests for comment from Education Uncovered. The federation told the local Southwark news, which carried a story yesterday on the redundancies, that they were “always a last resort,” adding: “Our priority is to ensure affected staff are supported and treated fairly and well within the law…as the teaching unions have warned, the declining birthrate combined with other financial pressures facing all schools have led [to] more redundancies across English education.”

This website will continue to follow these developments closely.

 

*The school was not named, but Lord Harris would appear to have been referring to Harris Academy Peckham. While the thrust of Harris Peckham and its predecessor schools not having received inspectors’ top grade may well be correct, the “75 year” claim may be slightly misleading, with Ofsted only dating to 1992 and the Her Majesty’s Inspector system which preceded it not operating in the same way.