To think executives earning £500,000 in a failing state secondary school system is utterly shameful?

[SharpOpalNewt]

How is this anything other than an absolute disgrace? This is public money and where all your taxes are going, while state secondary schools are an absolute shambles. The whole academy and free school system set up by Michael Gove is an absolute joke. They are royally taking the piss out of hard-working tax payers, parents, and the pupils who attend, many of whom are being completely failed by the current system.

England’s best-paid academy trust boss has been handed a £25,000 pay hike – taking his salary to over half a million pounds.

Harris Federation CEO Sir Dan Moynihan has become the first academy trust chief executive to cross the £500,000 threshold, latest accounts show.

He took home between £515,000 and £520,000 in 2023-24, up from a range of £485,000 to £490,000 the previous reporting year. This represents an increase of just over 5 per cent.

It is Moynihan’s second pay rise in a row. In 2022-23, his wages rose from between £455,000 to £460,000 to at least £485,000. This represented his first uplift in pay since 2018-19.

The trust – which has frequently been at the centre of controversy for its executive pay figures – has six other unnamed members of staff earning more than £190,000.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/moynihan-becomes-first-500k-academy-ceo/

I thought schools were seriously strapped for cash and did not even have enough money to employ specialist subject teachers or rebuild dodgy crumbling concrete classrooms? Let alone the textbooks, materials and school trips which were all routinely provided at one time.

As a comparison, the head of Eton earns less. I imagine Harris academies are not particularly like Eton.

I'm not saying LAs managed it better but they could manage it better given the funding to so do.

What are you basing this on? It'd be interesting actually to see teacher retention currently in LA ran schools and in academy schools thinking about it- is this available anywhere?

Also intrigued by:

There is absolutely no need for any level of management above a head teacher

https://naomicfisher.substack.com/p/why-arent-they-in-school

What should we do about attendance? Here’s a pathway I hear way too often. Child manages primary school fine, is happy there and excited to go to secondary school. They start, bright eyed and bushy tailed, and like many eleven-year-olds they find the transition hard. It’s a big step up.
Expectations are suddenly much higher than at primary school, not necessarily academically but in what is demanded of them outside the academics. They have to remember much more and the level of organisation required is significant. They have to get themselves from class to class with the right books and equipment and remember to walk on the right side of the corridor and not to talk. They don’t have one teacher throughout the day who they can get to know. They don’t know who to ask for help.

Eleven-year-olds are immature. They find all of this stuff much harder than adults, not because they are lazy, but because they are eleven and their brains have a lot of development still to do. They’ll still be developing until they are about 25, in fact. The things which are not well developed yet are exactly the things which they need to keep up secondary school – self-management, self-organisation and self-monitoring. It’s a struggle for them.

If their school has a high control approach, quickly they start to either get behaviour points or to worry about getting behaviour points. They start checking things all the time, and they become hysterical at home when they have lost a green pen, torn a homework page or they can’t find their socks. Emotion regulation is something else which is still in development at age eleven, and adolescents feel emotions (particularly when connected to shaming in front of their peers) intensely.

Their parents get alerts of demerits and they get detentions, having never been in trouble at primary school. They forget a detention (because they are eleven, and keeping track of things is harder when you are immature) and then they are in isolation. They start to lose their sparkle. They think that the teachers don’t like them. Everything piles up on them and they are increasingly unhappy. They start saying they don’t want to go to school.

School react by saying that if they don’t come every day, they’ll be excluded from the school trip and offer an certificate for 100% attendance. This doesn’t help. Their unhappiness increases. They become a ‘persistent absentee’ and their parents get official letters and perhaps fixed penalty fines. Their parents say ‘It was like falling off a cliff’ and they don’t know what to do.

Where’s the problem here? Is it ‘behaviour’ and they should simply be made to keep going to school? Or is there a problem with what is going on in some schools, creating an environment in which some children simply can’t thrive?
If we aren’t allowed to ask the question, we’ll never find out.

The problem is almost all schools which are nearly all academies have this approach, there is no choice of anything else- even a lot of private schools are super academic hot houses. I would have loved to have been able to choose one that didn't have that approach for DD2, and which was lovely and nurturing as her primary school was, but this didn't exist in the state system. DD1 got into a super selective grammar which had learned its lesson in the past about being overly pressurising and was far more sensible in its approach to discipline and homework. DD2 was not ever naughty or disruptive but secondary school actually induced an anxiety disorder and she could not learn there. We are highly supportive parents and used to be massive proponents of the state system. DH was a school governor for many years and we both have professionals careers and did well at school in the state system ourselves. I know many other middle class families locally who are fantastic parents who were failed by the state secondary school system - it is NOT necessarily linked to social deprivation - though of course that makes matters worse. We found the school on one hand offered "reasonable adjustments" but with the other hand were constantly hitting us with the attendance stick and threatening fines and prosecution, which made the whole situation 100 times worse. I know they are required to do this - it's the system - and the one run by these big chains, which is wrong.

We just throw them into a massive bear pit at 11 and it is an absolute disgrace that academy chains are taking so much public money to fail our children.

"attendance stick and threatening fines and prosecution, which made the whole situation 100 times worse. I know they are required to do this - it's the system - and the one run by these big chains, which is wrong"
This is wrong. It is government policy, not the fault of MATs.

You are conflating several separate issues and blaming MATs for them all.

Headteachers earn maybe £90,000 on average

In London they would earn more

This reads like a Labour Education spokesperson hitting back in light of pushback from the whole sector to the Education Bill......

YANBU.

Government policy did not ask them to bring in the high control approach.

YANBU

I'm not a huge fan of the academy concept or big salaries when people on the ground will be earning so little. But it's true LAs were doing a lot of these functions before.

He does have 40,000 pupils compared to etons 1300.

I worked out it's about £12 per pupil, but I haven't actually included on costs like NI and pension.

I'd be intrigued if he really added £12 plus value per child.

Don’t have them in Wales either but YANBU.

Government policy sets procedures for absence + fines.

Why do some schools (not just MATs FYI) feel the need for high control approach? Because behaviour has deteriorated due to: lack of CAHMMS support, increase in SEN, lack of jobs and nove away from vocational edyucation plus the fact that some parents pass onto their kids a lack of respect for schools + teachers. So we have a chicken + egg situation.

Like I said, you are conflating.

LEA would take top slice of funding from state maintained schools, Academies get all the funding.

Would it be better to look at cost per pupil rather than his salary as a whole.

The Trust's income is in excess of £400m, you might not like to see it as a business but with that level of income it is a business.

Behaviour has deteriorated at least partly because of this approach - children are assumed to be a problem before any problem occurs. The high control system and complete lack of individual attention is making many children act out in the first place, and making many well-behaved children who are wanting to sit and learn extremely anxious and avoid school altogether as they don't want to get into trouble. It's using a massive sledgehammer to crack a nut, and is often just missing the nut altogether anyway.

I am correctly linking several issues not conflating them.

Excessive pay for executives is a problem that affects other sectors too. Look at senior management in universities - VCs earning 300-400k but redundancies for low-paid staff and not replacing others because of "cost constraints".

Bosses of water companies giving themselves vast bonuses while polluting England's rivers.

The prime minister earns a third what this guy does. It's not justifiable.

I am not a fan of MATs but I believe in diversity in the sector and that parents should have more choice not less.

Please can you show me data which proves that rates of absence, mental health etc are worse in MATs than LA run schools? I am not convinced it exists.
Because it isn't just MATs which are run along the lines of high discipline etc. Life was not all unicorns and rainbows when schools were LA run, indeed my grammar school went grant maintained in early 90s to get out of the clutches of the LA.

You aren't "correctly linking", you are conflating

YANBU.

The idea is if you don't pay £500k the talent would either go abroad or go into a different sector
Agree it was much better when LAs had oversight. During at least the next few years there will be fewer children as housing is too expensive to have children and migrants coming on boats are mostly men and other migrants are clamped down or dont see UK as attractive. So much better la decides which schools shut. Also need to bring SEND back from private schools as UK salaries and council tax for LAs can't afford them.

The over strict schooling was because kids misbehave as education no longer a gateway to a lucrative career.

Tell me about it. I'm a retired teacher, now a trustee of a charity, so I hear this constantly.

Of course CEOs of charities are expected to manage and keep afloat international organisations with thousands of employees in complex and difficult environments and a budget of many millions of pounds, as a volunteer and without admin costs. Because every penny of that £1 that Joe Bloggs put on the collection tin should go... Well I'm not sure where, if it can't pay the salaries of those who provide the services.

But aren't educational outcomes better than they were when all schools were under the LEA?

I have no objection to those running large charities earning a good salary. That is completely different from the issue being discussed in this thread.

Academies are educational charities

No, though the trusts are very good at manipulating figures to make themselves look good.

@SharpOpalNewt technically a multi academy trust is a charity

I don't give a flying shit what the business model is. The fact is they are hoovering up public money while failing children, and this is a disgrace.