Revealed: how DfE’s push to limit pay of leaders of large academy chains came to nothing

A government drive to limit steadily-climbing pay among leaders of major academy chains can be revealed today as having come to nothing, with the average remuneration of leaders of the largest chains having soared well beyond classroom staff rises.

During the years 2017 to 2020, ministers and Department for Education officials were making some effort to restrain salaries among academy leaders, which at this stage were already often well in advance of the roughly £150,000 a year paid to the Prime Minister.

In 2018, the-then Education Secretary, Damian Hinds, had criticised high chief executive pay, while Lord Agnew, academies minister at the time, told a committee of MPs that: “This is public money, and frankly if a MAT chief executive is being paid more than the prime minister, this should only be in circumstance and leadership.”

The Conservative peer had also said that pay rises for chief executives should not be in excess of those for teachers.

DfE officials were busy, in this period, writing to academy trusts which had either more than one person paid £100,000 a year or more, or at least one on £150,000 or more.

Even by 2019, it was clear that this drive was facing a tough challenge. In February of that year, Education Uncovered published an analysis showing that the supposedly “exceptional” salaries of £150,000 or more were, by 2017-18, actually already being paid to 18 of the leaders of the 20 largest MATs.

Now further analysis shows how, since 2017-18 and the time of that previous effort by the DfE, pay rises at the top end have continued an upward trajectory, with average remuneration for leaders of the top-20 largest chains rising to a figure which last year was well beyond not £150,000, but £200,000.

In 2017-18, average remuneration, excluding employers’ pensions contributions, for the highest-paid person at England’s largest 20 trusts had been approximately* £198,500, with the leaders of all but two trusts – E-Act and David Ross – paid at least £150,000.

Fast-forward four years, and recently-published accounts for 2021-22 show that(see graph here), while it was still the case that 18 of the leaders of the 20 largest trusts were paid at least £150,000, average pay overall had climbed to £222,500.

So that is £72,500, on average, beyond what five years ago ministers were saying should be a salary only paid out in exceptional circumstances. Well over half – 13 – of the 20 trusts had a leader paid at least £200,000 a year. In 2017-18, seven had been paid £200,000 or more.

The rise in average pay for leaders of the largest trusts, over the four years from 2017-18 to 2021-22, also works out at 12 per cent. This compares to an increase of only 7.6 per cent in the salaries of teachers at the top of classroom pay spine, under the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document, which applies in the maintained sector and is also used by many academy trusts.

The DfE eventually abandoned its previous push on high pay in the academies sector. Letters to trusts, which had appeared on its website during 2017 to 2019, stopped being published there. Last year, I asked the department through a freedom of information request what had happened, and if any further letters were available.

The DfE replied that, in August 2020, its Education and Skills Funding Agency had sent a fresh round of letters to trusts on high pay. But these had not been published.

In its FOI response, the DfE stated that the non-publication had been “because sector wide issues were identified with the comparability of accounts returns data submitted by trusts. Therefore we paused our work to recollect the data, quality assure and review it against the original data collection.”

It added: “Crucially, we agreed that the department would use this review of the pay data as a starting point to work with the sector to review our overall approach on pay and ensure that we deliver robust challenge on high pay in a way that is fair, reasonable and transparent. When this review is complete, we will set out our future policy and data on high pay in the sector.”  

Last month, Schools Week carried a report which pointed to an outcome of this process. Now, it was reported, the DfE’s alleged “crackdown” on high pay in the trust sector would focus on “outliers”. In other words, “Academy leaders earning significantly more than their peers at similar trusts face new scrutiny from government.”

However, close readers of the analysis above will need no reminding of the implications of this statement. If virtually all leaders of the major trusts are now paid above £150,000, and indeed the going rate for these largest trusts on average is well over £200,000, then any focus on “outliers” will leave all of them untouched by pay regulation.

Thus, the figure of £150,000 or even £200,000, previously described by ministers as ideally payable only to leaders in “exceptional” circumstances, seems now effectively to being accepted without query by the government, at least for leaders of large trusts, and not subject to any meaningful regulation.

While some trust leaders might argue that there has been inflation since 2017-18 and that trust size has risen, clearly classroom staff have not enjoyed the same uplift to their pay, and neither do they have the chance to see remuneration rise as the size of trusts increases.

The effect of all of the above, then, seems to be that the government has given up on regulating the pay of larger trusts, even though Schools Week’s story does say that “no final decisions [are] understood to have been made or signed off by ministers”. It may be that “outlier” decisions by boards to hand very high salaries to the leaders of smaller trusts may prompt interventions by officials. But, to repeat, this will leave the larger trusts untouched because pay at levels previously described by ministers as usually unacceptable has become the norm.

This is despite the presence of high salaries in the sector having been criticised in more than one report by the cross-party Commons Public Accounts Committee, which in 2018 warned that such money “could be better spent” in the classroom.

In the absence of any sign of more robust intervention from the DfE, however, it seems unsurprising that the Confederation of School Trusts, the main lobby organisation for the large chains, enthusiastically greeted the news that the DfE had adopted what it termed a “more proportionate” approach on the issue. Teachers, striking today over pay increases which have been well below those seen by leaders of the largest trusts over the period since 2010, may not agree.

-Four years ago, a very detailed and impressively analytical report for the Local Government Association on spending in the academies and local authority sector recommended the DfE make the setting of salaries for multi-academy trust chief executives “subject to a framework,” such as that currently provided for teachers in the maintained sector by the School Teachers’ Review Body.

There is no sign that that recommendation has ever been responded to or taken on board by the government.

*I say “approximately” as employee pay tends to be published only in £5,000 or £10,000 bands in academy accounts. The assumption behind the figures for both years quoted above is that actual pay was mid-way within the published band for each person.