Revealed: the academy trust leader whose pay has trebled in 10 years

The chief executive of England’s 11th-largest multi-academy trust saw his pay rise by at least £40,000 last year, or 13 per cent –meaning that his remuneration has trebled in the past decade.

Simon Beamish, of the 32-school Leigh Academies Trust (LAT), received pay of £350-£360,000 in 2023-24, as it climbed from £305-£310,000 the previous year, newly-published accounts for last academic year show.

The increase, which could be as much as £55,000 or 18 per cent, appears to be* comfortably the largest seen among any of the major chains in 2023-24. It leaves Mr Beamish clear in second place on the list of England’s highest-paid academy leaders.

With Sir Dan Moynihan, CEO of the 55-academy Harris Federation, confirmed on Friday night as the possessor of the first £500,000 pay package in English state education, this means that the pay and pensions payments of the country’s two most-well remunerated academy leaders between them topped £1 million last year.

Mr Beamish’s rise for 2023-24 was in the range 12.9 to 18 per cent. This compares to the rate for most classroom teachers, as seen in the national School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD), of 6.5 per cent for 2023-24. So the CEO’s increase last year was in the order of at least double that seen for classroom staff.

Mr Beamish’s employer’s pensions contributions also increased last year, from £60-£65,000 in 2022-23 to £70-£75,000. This took his total pay and pensions package to £420-£435,000 in 2023-24.

A look back at LAT’s accounts since its inception as a multi-academy trust in 2012 shows that Mr Beamish’s pay has increased every year since he became CEO during 2013-14, with last year’s having been the largest gain in absolute terms.

Back in 2013-14, he received £115-£120,000**. This means his pay since then has increased by a factor of at least 190 per cent (ie multiplied almost by three) and possibly as high as 210 per cent, depending on where in the published band his actual salary was, with his annual pay having risen by around £235,000 over the period***.

By contrast, a teacher in the middle of the main pay spine, working in England outside of London, saw their pay rise by just 32 per cent over this 10-year period, from £27,376 to £36,051.

I have set this out, plotting the pay over the past decade of Mr Beamish, and also of Sir Dan Moynihan at Harris, against that of a teacher outside of London on M4 of the national pay scale, in the following graph. This shows, incidentally, that Mr Beamish’s pay has been gaining ground on Sir Dan in recent years, though on present trends it will take 15 more years for the former to overtake the latter. (Note, also, the much flatter trajectory of the teacher graph below).

It is true that Leigh, which is based in Rochester in Kent and controls schools in the county and in nearby local authorities, has itself expanded by more than three times since 2014. In fact, at 23,482 pupils in January 2024, it had more than five times the 4,409 children, across only six schools, that it had on its books in 2013-14.

However, it is not sustainable for organisations which grow rapidly to increase the pay of their leaders by a comparable multiple: the leader of a single academy trust with one secondary school, for example on £100,000 a year would not expect to see their salary increase to £2 million, if it increased in size over time to be running 20 such schools. Indeed, the national pay structure for school leaders, as contained in the STPCD, does not see pay rise in this way, as schools increase in size.

LAT’s schools generally have a successful track record although it has one of England’s highest rates of turnover of teaching staff. It does, however, seem to charge schools relatively little in terms of its levies on their budgets for central costs, at what its accounts said was 1.9 per cent of schools’ “total income” in 2023-24.

Two years ago, Education Uncovered revealed how Mr Beamish’s pay had increased by at least 7.7 per cent in 2021-22 despite teachers across England having been handed a pay freeze.

Brief Harris details

Harris’s annual accounts for 2023-24 were published on the federation’s website on Friday afternoon, hours before the arrival of the end-of-January 31^st deadline by which the government says they have to be there.

They confirmed that Sir Dan Moynihan became the first leader of any state-funded school in England (and quite probably the first leader of any school at all in England) to receive more than £500,000 in pay alone.

His pay was £515,000-£520,000 – a rise of at least £25,000 or 5 per cent, and possibly as high as £35,000 or 7.2 per cent on top of the £485-£490,000 he had to make do on the previous year. (It may be that his increase was in line with that seen nationally for teachers, at 6.5 per cent).

With his pension coming in at £80-£85,000, which was also an increase on the £75-£80k figure the previous year, Sir Dan’s total package in terms of pay and pensions topped £600,000 for the first time last year****.

These figures also mean that the total pay and pensions packages of Sir Dan and Simon Beamish between them broke through the £1m barrier last year. Together, their pay and employers’ pensions contributions came to £1,020,000-£1,045,000 in 2023-24.

Future Academies

Another large increase for the leader of a multi-academy trust which has featured repeatedly on these pages over the years is worth flagging up.

Lawrence Foley, chief executive of the 10-school Future Academies, received £175-£180,000 in pay in 2023-24. This is an increase of at least £50,000 on the £120-£125,000 he received in 2022-23, although he only took on the job part-way through the latter year, so the increase is not based on a like-for-like comparison.

Future’s 2022-23 accounts***** state that Dr Foley was appointed in November 2022, which would mean his pay for that year was based on being in post for 10 months of the academic year. A £120-£125,000 salary for the 10 months would equate to £144-£150,000 on a full-year basis. This would mean a salary increase in the range of 17 to 25 per cent for Dr Foley.

This is clearly a sizeable rise, although it only brought up Dr Foley to the £175-£180k that his predecessor, Paul Smith, received in 2021-22. This, in itself, was lower than the £180-£185k awarded to Mr Smith in 2020-21.

*Among accounts of the big chains which I’ve currently seen, which is most of them, with all accounts for 2023-24 required to have been on trusts’ websites by last Friday, January 31^st.

**It is not clear from the 2013-14 accounts, but it may be that Mr Beamish only became the CEO part-way through that year. Before that, he was a principal of one of LAT’s schools. So it might be that the pay for that year was lower than it would have been if he were CEO for the entire 12 months. However, the pay for 2014-15, which was definitely a full year as CEO, at £145-£150,000, still indicates that his salary since then had well over doubled by 2024.  

***Mr Beamish’s employer’s pensions payments were not disclosed in 2013-14, as far as I can see. The figure for 2014-15 was £20-£25,000, meaning they have risen by a factor of around three, as well, over this nine-year period.  

**** It is not mathematically certain, from the published pay and pensions figures within bands as stated above, that Sir Dan’s overall package was in excess of £600,000. However, this separate disclosure of pay and pensions payments for 2023-24 by Harris does put it in the £600,001-£610,000 range.

*****Future’s latest accounts, for 2023-24, state that Dr Foley was appointed in January 2023. So that clashes with what is stated for 2022-23. I have based my calculations on what was stated in 2022-23, since if he started in January 2023 this would imply a much larger annual rate for 2022-23, and a per-month pay cut in 2023-24, which seems unlikely.