The academy chain where the CEO makes nearly half a million—and teachers recruited from Jamaica get under £30k

Academies were meant to ensure greater investments in pupils, curricula and teachers. But in many, the most direct beneficiaries have been the senior leaders.

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Oct 11, 2024

Academies - schools that are funded by the government but are run by not-for-profit “trusts” - are perhaps a somewhat lesser-known product of the nineties, precisely because they now seem so ubiquitous. The idea was to insulate schools from local authority pressures and red tape, while at the same time allowing them to raise additional funds elsewhere. They could do this individually or group into multi-academy trusts (MATs) and centralise the administrative costs, freeing up funds to create innovative curricula, ensure personalised learning and improve teachers’ salaries.

The Conservatives took the academies experiment and expanded it on a massive scale. When Labour left office in 2010, only five per cent of state secondary schools were academies. By the time Labour returned to power this past July, it was 80% of state secondary schools and 41% of primary ones. And contrary to its original promise, says the National Education Union (NEU), this change has “driven down staff pay, terms and conditions, alienated communities and caused the fragmentation of the education system.”

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There is, however, one group whose salaries have indeed improved immeasurably with academisation: senior leadership. As Schools Week revealed in their annual chief executive pay investigation in March, the (public-funded) salaries of those in senior leadership roles now match those of private firms.

This means that there are now 44 MAT CEOs across the country earning more than £200,000; three broke through the £300,000 threshold last year, and one — Sir Dan Moynihan, CEO of the Harris Federation — is on a salary of £485,000. (For context, the highest possible salary for a leadership figure at a local authority school is £140,000.)

“It was always meant to be a case of: the bigger the trust, the more savings it could make,” says Thomas Mann, deputy headteacher of 35 years, and member of the Campaign for State Education (CASE). “And it really doesn't work. Our research shows that actually, the bigger the trust, the more they spend on senior leadership.”

A study conducted by Education Uncovered revealed that by comparing the 50 largest MATs with the ten largest local authority areas - two sets that educate roughly the same amount of pupils - the MATs had 13 times the number of people on salaries of at least £200,000, and spent £68.2m on six-figure salaries in 2021-22. The comparable sum for local authorities is £24.4m. “This diversion of funding from the classroom to the pockets of senior managers and administrators of academies has not been accompanied by any noticeable rise in standards within the academy system,” says CASE, “and is therefore a scandal.” And it’s the teachers, support staff and pupils paying the price.

With a leader on a nearly half-a-million pound salary, the Harris Federation is no stranger to being scrutinised by the media - at least by the educational media. But last year, more than 1,000 staff members signed an open letter asking the Trust to improve their working conditions, shining a light on the reality of life at the other end of the scale.

“The Harris Federation works teachers an awful lot,” says Emily Sims,* a teacher with a middle-management position at the London-based MAT, who signed the open letter. A survey of the Trust carried out by the National Education Union (NEU) found that its teachers worked an average of 53 hours per week, and “for anyone on middle leadership,” says Sims, “that figure is more like 65-70. For the majority of my time here I’ve worked on-site from 7am-7pm.”

While Sims joined the school as a teacher of one subject, before long, her role stretched to teaching two subjects, plus she was requested to take on a whole-school responsibility with little support. “There was a six-month period when [after leaving the site] I’d come home and work until 10pm.” More than half (55%) of the survey respondents said they felt stress at work “very often”, with 70% of those citing workload as one of the main contributors. Sims has been signed off due to her mental health in the past, while several of her colleagues are on anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication.

One of the vaunted benefits of the academy model is that, unlike schools still under the control of local authorities, there is no requirement to adhere to the national teacher pay scale, meaning schools can offer more attractive salaries to net the best talent. And on the surface, says Sims, “it looks really lucrative. I’m on £51,000 myself.” But aside from the unsustainable working conditions asked of teachers, pay progression is linked to pupil results - which was not the case when Sims first took the job.

“I know there are [Jamaican] teachers here with years of experience and the right qualifications who are on £25k”

In layman’s terms, this means if pupils don’t get the grade, their teachers will find it very difficult to get a pay rise. “For the majority of us, it is so difficult to progress through the pay scale, it becomes clear you would have earned more in a local-authority school.” (The NEU advises automatic pay progression, where teachers move up the salary scale in accordance with their experience).

And of course, no fixed pay scale also means you can pay teachers less than the government’s advised banding, and one of the aims of the open letter was to draw attention to pay inequality between UK and overseas teaching staff. “The trust has done a ‘brain drain’ scheme with Jamaica,” says Sims, “and what they pay these teachers is astronomically low in comparison to those from the UK.” Sims explains that a newly qualified teacher working in an inner-London school would earn £36,745, according to national pay scales.

“I know there are [Jamaican] teachers here with years of experience and the right qualifications who are on £25k,” she says. “But part of the arrangement is that the Harris Federation pay for and sponsor their visa. And they need that, so they’re held here.” An NEU spokesperson confirmed to The Lead the union is aware of such cases, saying “…teachers from Jamaica who started work at the Harris Federation prior to 2024 and were unable to obtain qualified teacher status (QTS) other than via a lengthy and expensive process of assessment have been paid on the unqualified teacher pay scales, even though they were appointed to undertake the duties of a qualified teacher, which they are.”

Pushing teachers beyond breaking point

And while it is a legal requirement for teachers in local authority-maintained schools to have QTS status, academies are allowed to use their own discretion as to how well their teachers have been trained. “At least one position in every department in my school is covered by a supply teacher, and they don’t even need to [have] any teaching qualifications at all,” says Sims.

This reliance on supply teachers is often attributed to the recruitment crisis (a third of teachers leave within their first five years on the job), but Mann explains that there is a widely held belief that some MATs are purposefully creating a ‘churn’ of cheap teachers, as a cost-saving exercise. “Harris in particular has been accused time and time again of taking on newly qualified teachers, working them for a couple of years and basically getting rid of them,” he says. And this of course has huge repercussions inside the classroom. “When you have this transient staffing structure, those [teacher-student] relationships that are key, particularly to the vulnerable kids, don't get made because they’re always sat in a classroom in front of someone new.”

“Silicon valley-style conferences where they tell us every year they’re making more profit”

Sims agrees that the resource needed to effectively manage behaviour is simply not there, and at her school - where the majority of children are eligible for free school meals - behaviour that was ‘challenging’ just a few years ago is now “completely unsafe.” Violence breaks out every day, she says, not just in the playground but in the classroom too. “Just recently I had to leave my own class unattended, in order to break up a fight somewhere else.” Teachers are beyond breaking point, she says. “One colleague was recently fired on the spot for crying in the classroom,” she says, “and I know of more than one teacher who has been sectioned.” And the pupils are being left to flounder. “I had a student come to me and say, ‘Please Miss, can you teach me? I haven’t learnt anything’.”

The Harris Federation “is definitely making money,” says Sims. In her role she has access to the school’s budget and attends the MAT’s “Silicon valley-style conferences where they tell us every year they’re making more profit.” But that money is not being reinvested into ways to support the running of the school, or the children and their welfare. Harris Federation is continually building new sites, she says, [the MAT currently lists 55 academies] “but we don’t even have a student nurse.”

Liz Green*, a special educational needs (SEN) teacher at another London-based MAT agrees that “just to have more people working in our school would be fantastic…[but] how can you attract teaching assistants when you get paid more working in Lidl?” But without them, says Green, it is the children who suffer. “Recently, we had a child from a very vulnerable background who needed one-to-one support from our most experienced behavioural person. “ With no one else to check in on the “several other children that also needed help,” said Green, “they all kicked off. The support is just so gossamer-thin that when something goes wrong we have no resilience at all.”

In her 30-year teaching career, says Green, she has never seen “the amount of money being spent on bureaucracy,” as there is today. The result is a top-down approach to education in which those who manage the running of a school are completely divorced from those who teach in it, says Green, with decisions being made from a financial- rather than child-centred perspective. “There are some children at our school with EHCP [education and health care plan] and I know that they’re coming with money from the local education authority to help them, “ says Green. “But when I’ve questioned what support they’ll receive, I’m told there’s no money; they’ll have to use whatever’s already in place.” Green’s school is in a poorer area of London, she says. If it were more middle-class, with parents more likely to have the capacity to fight for their children’s rights, “I don’t think they’d get away with it.”

What her MAT is adept at, says Green, is “spinning a yarn,” using data and league table results “to make the claim ‘we’re doing the best by children’,” says Green, “but it’s disingenuous.” Sims agrees that optics are everything, but in truth, “the Harris Federation doesn’t invest all the money they make per child into the children. So they’re not truly helping them.”

A spokesperson for the Harris Federation said:

“The Harris Federation and our 5,000 staff, of whom The Lead says it has spoken to one, run some of London’s most successful schools in some of its most disadvantaged areas, with consistently brilliant results and outcomes achieved for pupils. This has been achieved by creating great places of work, where staff aren’t just paid more than in other schools but also receive sector-leading training, support and career progression.

“Our classrooms are well-resourced even in the context of the funding pressures currently being faced by all schools, and the Harris Federation invests an extra £9 million per year in our academies because of our fundraising efforts and economies of scale.

“We are delighted to employ many superb Jamaican teachers who choose to join us, even though they are also highly sought after by other schools, because we combine competitive pay and benefits with a high level of support for their careers.

“As for the accusation that we neglect to invest in pastoral care, this is not just nonsense, but also a disservice to the staff in our schools, which are rated Good or Outstanding across the board, with pastoral care inspected each time. As a Federation, we have invested heavily to create our own team of mental health practitioners to provide services directly to pupils, bypassing the barriers to care, such as long waiting lists, these children would otherwise face.”

*Names have been changed.