No mention of the 168 people paid six figures at the Harris Federation – and other strange aspects of new Taxpayers’ Alliance report on academy pay

TPA’s first report on academy leader remuneration, more than two decades after launch of the policy, is full of holes, despite garnering coverage in national media.

 

 

It was billed as standing in a long tradition of detailed probing into senior pay in the public sector – but this week’s investigation into remuneration among academy trust leaders by the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA) had so many holes and curiosities, it is difficult to know where to start.

On Sunday, the right-leaning campaign group finally revealed its first-ever analysis of multi-academy trust senior pay, more than 20 years after the first academies opened. That it has taken this long was, in itself, striking, given that the organisation has long carried out research into high pay within councils, yet with the large trusts paying, more pupil, on management than do large local authorities.

The other initial curiosity was the year, with the TPA analysis focusing on accounts for 2022-23, though those for 2023-24 have been public since January this year.

The TPA’s investigation must, in itself, have taken time and is painstaking in that sense, as it published data from the individual accounts of 757 academy trusts. This is the largest such exercise I have seen. It must have involved trawling through more than the 757 accounts, since only those whose leaders received more than £100,000 in pay and pensions were listed. Perhaps this may explain the timelag.

However, sadly there is little in the report of substance to back up the central finding set out in the headline of the press release of the research, that: “First multi-academy trust rich list finds clear evidence of link between performance and pay.”

The TPA does highlight the fact that Sir Dan Moynihan, the chief executive of England’s second-largest academy trust, the Harris Federation, was the sector’s highest-paid person in 2022-23, with a total pay and pensions package of around £565,000.

It then states that the Harris Federation had all 49 of the academies which had been inspected under its control rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. In what is listed as the full research report, the rest of the top 10 best-paid people in the sector are listed against their trust’s Ofsted record. 

And, in most cases, this does indeed appear impressive; Harris’s Ofsted figures are extraordinary*, and, overall, school inspection results less than good are sparse in this list of 10 trusts with the highest-paid leaders.

However, the claims made by the TPA, seemingly only on the back of this, are dubiously sweeping. The press release states: “While the TPA remains firmly of the view that the details of all taxpayer-funded remuneration packages should be scrutinised, in the case of multi-academy trusts there is reason to believe that many of these pay packets are justified.

“The research reveals that there are 290 schools managed by the ten highest remunerated multi-academy trust heads, with 264 [91 per cent] rated outstanding or good by Ofsted. Many of the schools run by these bodies were formerly local authority run schools which had been in special measures.”

But, although the research then quotes a figure from Harris that 70 per cent of its schools had previously been in Ofsted’s lowest category, otherwise there was no detail on how many former LA schools had been.

Moreover, the TPA offers no comparison of what the overall proportion of Ofsted good or outstanding schools was in the non-academy sector. During 2022-23, research from the Local Government Association – admittedly coming to this debate from a more pro-local authority perspective – put the figure for local authority schools at 93 per cent. 

The TPA’s headline argued that its rich list had found “clear evidence of link between performance and pay”. But in broad terms it had not: beyond the very basic listing of the 10 trusts against their Ofsted record, there was no general tracking of individual pay against Ofsted or other results records across the sector.

The TPA’s researcher, Jonathan Eida, was quoted stating: “[Multi-academy trusts’] strong performance in raising standards means many of these pay packets look justified.”

But Education Uncovered has consistently reported on cases where high pay seemed questionable or unusual. There was no sense, within that statement, as to how “many” might be justified – as there could not be, given that the only analysis presented of pay set against schools’ Ofsted results in this report was in relation to only 10 academy trusts, with the highest leader’s remuneration overall.

Possibly the most significantly odd bit of this analysis, as stated in the TPA’s press release, went as follows: “The average total remuneration of the 757 [academy leaders on £100k or more in total remuneration] in 2022-23 was £156,491. In comparison, the maximum that a headteacher of a single local authority maintained school could be paid was £123,057, with this figure only including salary, meaning the total remuneration package would be considerably higher.

“This shows that high pay is not limited to academies, with often poorly performing local authority-maintained schools also boasting significant remuneration packages for senior staff.”

The strangest and arguably most revealing thing about the above two paragraphs is that the analysis has chosen to offer a non- like-for-like comparison – academy packages including pensions, versus local authority school ones without – when a like-for-like comparison would have been just as possible. In other words, it is possible to say what leaders of hundreds of academy trusts were paid, without pensions, and compare it to the pay of those without pensions in the non-academy sector.

In doing so, it would be fairer to compare this position on average, rather than, as above, to offer a supposed comparison of the average within a large group of academy leaders, versus the maximum payable to local authority headteachers.

And of course, often comparing the remuneration of leaders of multi-academy trusts versus that of headteachers in the local authority sector again misses the point: it is local authority directors of children’s services, in the non-academy maintained sector, who are in the analogous position to MAT chief executives. So comparing MAT leader pay to LA director pay would be a fairer comparison again.

Research I have done for this website, and for the Campaign for State Education, has found that the large multi-academy trusts are paying much more, per pupil, on highly-paid managers than do their counterparts working as directors for councils.

The “often poorly performing local authority-maintained schools” bit of the above quote also belies the ideological framing of this work. Academies have been presented as high-performing, and non-academies as “often poorly-performing,” when in reality there is little difference between the two sectors, in terms of performance. Nor does the TPA investigation give any sense of how many non-academy heads are on the maximum pay, and whether in those cases their schools are underperforming.

The research gained coverage including in the Daily Mail and Telegraph, the latter of which had a headline stating “Paying academy heads more improves schools’ results, report says”. However, as argued above, the report did not show this.

The “full research,” as linked to by the press release, runs to only just over four pages, much of which are taken up by data tables, with no claims about local authority schools’ performance, as far as I can see, made within it to back up what is stated in the press release. So it is perhaps not surprising that the press release’s claims seem so full of holes.

There are a couple of other strange aspects to this report, before I finish up. One is a straightforward factual error, around the non-reporting of remuneration for some academy trusts’ leaders.

The research states: “Data for the remuneration of multi-academy trust heads was taken from the accounts…Occasionally the trust did not provide the remuneration for their head, [sic] often this was because the multi-academy trust did not directly remunerate the chief executive instead the charity which operated the trust did so.”

This, I’m afraid, is nonsense. The charity which operates the academy trust is the academy trust. And almost all academy trusts pay their chief executive in the same way: the trust receives its money in income and pays its leader his or her salary, benefits and pension.

The reason the chief executive’s pay is sometimes not revealed in academy trust accounts is that this only has to happen when that person sits on the board as a trustee/director. If they do not, then it is possible to see what the highest pay – exclusive of pensions – was in any given year, through a table of statistics listing the number of people paid £60,000 or more, in £10k bands, but not the identity of those individuals.

Finally, it is odd that the report confines itself to listing only the pay of the leader of each trust, in its collation of people paid £100,000 or more including pensions. For in the larger trusts, there will be many people on these six figure salaries.

As an illustration, I looked up the high pay disclosures for the most recent year on record, 2023-24, of the Harris Federation. Staggeringly, perhaps, this had 168 people on £100,000 or more, including pensions. Yet the TPA’s report only lists only one person against Harris, Sir Dan Moynihan.

In this way, it can be seen that the true figure, in terms of the number of people overall on six figures, within the academies sector, will be far higher than the TPA’s total of 757.  

All in all, then, while the TPA has put a lot of work into this in terms of collating the data, it does have the sense of letting academy leaders off the hook, seemingly in support of a political agenda which is clear, with the press release complaining about moves by “this Labour government,” through the schools bill, which could “limit academy freedoms”.

It could be argued that the pay of some of the most well-remunerated people in the sector is justified, given the Ofsted records presented here, though I would still question in such cases why rewards should not be spread out more evenly across organisations, rather than reward being focused on those at the top. But the report has not made the case that even such justifications can be made in most trusts, failing as it does to analyse pay at trust level across the sector.

In the length of the report and its biases, it is very revealing. Although, other than its presentation of the Ofsted records of those 10 trusts, perhaps not in the way the TPA would have hoped.

*To the extent that I wonder why first-person reports such as those offered by union reps during the National Education Union’s recent campaign for better pay and conditions at Harris’s secondaries and sixth forms are not reflected in the schools’ Ofsted records.

NOTE OF CORRECTION: I amended the headline and a number in this story as originally published. It had orginally said that there were 159 people on £100k or higher, including pensions, at Harris Federation last year. My calculations had missed out nine people from that figure. So the piece has been corrected so that the correct figure of 168 people is given.