This is why academization is a scandal ....

[Mischance]

Extract from a letter to The Guardian ........

Take my home town of York as an example: where once the 63 state schools were maintained by a director of children’s services on circa £110,000 and an assistant director of education on circa £80,000, we now have six Mats whose focus is increasingly drawn outside the city boundaries. Together they now employ six CEOs on salaries ranging from at least £130,000 to more than £160,000, six CFOs and several executive heads, and sport a combined wage bill for “key management personnel” that exceeds £7m – money the former education authority could only dream of. Meanwhile, more than a third of the city’s schools remain under the local authority.

With school attendance tanking, young people’s wellbeing in the doldrums and a special education needs system in crisis, public money that should be going into the classroom is instead going on duplicated roles and high individual salaries. This, and the lack of any meaningful local accountability, is the real scandal that needs addressing if we are to resolve the financial perils of an education sector that is no longer fit for purpose.

Yep. It's a scandal. Since becoming part of an academy our school has increased management x3, all on generous salaries whilst not doing much, yet they can't justify the cost of enough TAs and when behaviour is out of control management are no where to be seen.

Sounds crap, but I will say that we don't have academies in Wales and education isn't any better.

I think Panorama did an expose a few years ago as MATS have been taking the piss since day 1 and nothing has changed. The academisation project is a monumental and scandalous waste of public funds.

I agree with you.

A local MAT of 11 schools 5 primary, 6 secondary), CEO earns £250,000!

Absolutely no comparison the the role of Director of CYPS - and all that this role is responsible for - and with a salary of about £150,000.

@Mischance did you write the letter?

Headteachers can now earn up to £140k (and £150k in Central London) so why would anyone want to work as a Director of Education of MAT CEO for less than a headteacher salary? They are tough jobs and need to be rewarded.

Are the 6 MATs in York entirely based in York? Presumably not as you said they were focussed elsewhere. So it's not reasonable to tot up those CEO salaries and compare the result to the LA lead role. Also, it's not reasonable to isolate individual roles without considering the total costs.

And then, of course, you have to consider the cost-benefit balance.

There are studies on all of this, and no doubt there will be more in future. However, I don't think an emotive Guardian letter is worthy of anyone's time.

Agree with this.

How much would you expect somebody in such an important role to earn?

OP totally agree with you, MATs are a total scandal and the sooner the government puts a stop to their gravy trains the better.

Not all MATs are the same and to tar them all with the same brush is naive or disingenuous .
Our MAT has 19 primary schools, a CEO on 111k and a central team of 13 people. We are a lean team who support our schools really well. We know our schools unique needs and our headteachers can get hold of us at anytime.

Maintained schools in our county complain that when they ring HR/Finance, etc at the council, they have to relay their predicament from the beginning because officers aren't assigned to individual schools. They can get school improvement support unless they are 'Requires Improvement' or 'Inadequate' and they feel forgotten.

Not all LA’s are the same either though.

My LA provides an excellent core school improvement offer to all maintained schools, this is increased by need, so if a school is RI or inadequate. Schools can also buy even more time.

Our schools also have named HR officers, finance officers, safeguarding advisers, H&S officers, governance officers and inclusion partners.

@Mischance this is an interesting thread. https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5297106-to-dispise-mats-multi-academy-trusts?page=4&reply=143623573

Academisation is privatisation of schools which are then asset stripped. It’s stunned me for years how the money has been stolen from our children

I explicitly spoke about our LA, not every LA. I did so to draw attention to making sweeping assumptions and I'll informed views about a significant proportion of the sector.

It's not a black and white issue.

It really isn't. Academies are run by charities. As with any charity, there are strict limitations on paying trustees and they cannot distribute any profits to their owners. They cannot asset strip. The main asset any school has is its land. Whilst an academy trust may own the land on which it operates, it is a very limited form of ownership. They need the Secretary of State's approval before disposing of any land. If that approval is given, the Secretary of State can order the academy to give the land to the local authority or another school at a price determined by the SoS (usually free), or to pay the full market price of the land to the LA or the DoE before selling it.

Agree with this. The letter does not compare like with like. It uses LA salaries from a few years ago and compares them with the salaries today of those leading MATs that happen to run some schools in the city but may run many more schools elsewhere.

Whilst some dispute this, the evidence is that academies have improved educational outcomes for children. After years of slipping down the PISA tables, the UK Is now going up, with England going up since the widespread roll out of academies whilst Scotland (which does not have academies) has gone down. This is why academies have support from both the main parties.

Outcomes for children are what is important, not the pay of the CEO. Given a choice between a school where the head earns £80k and children massively underperform and one where the head earns £150k and the children massively exceed expectations, which one would you want to send your child to?

I am the chair of governors at a large school in a MAT. I think the system has pros and cons and there are good and bad MATs. In my area, the local authority is under resourced with high turnover and the level of support offered by our MAT as compared to LA schools is incomparable. There are so many central resources, CPD, HR, finance, cross-Trust working, and much greater accountability to the MAT but with excellent school improvement leaders who provide a huge amount of support. The central team at our MAT is also fairly lean and I don’t feel it represents poor value for money.

The downsides are there is sometimes tension between heads and the MAT, some MATs (not mine) are too controlling and want all their schools to be homogenous without taking local context into account. Another big downside I feel is that heads no longer aspire to be heads - headship is a stepping stone to a MAT leadership position. Which means much greater turnover of heads.

I would not be willing to be a chair of governors in an LA school. Far too much responsibility rests on the shoulders of governors, who are volunteers with minimal training.

Interesting. One of our local ones tried to sell their land to Tesco. It didn’t go ahead in the end because of local planning/access issues.

So, instead they knocked down half the school and built a primary there instead (same trust). So the secondary lost a lot of the building and a sports field. Now the secondary (huge academy school with over 1,500 children) is so overcrowded that the students can’t all sit down for lunch, so they have to walk the corridors with food in takeaway cartons and eat like that. But it’s okay, because now the trust have more income from the primary! And the same amount from secondary students per head, just crammed into the same building.

They do send some of them to a “reset” room at a sister school though so that keeps numbers down a bit I suppose (and means there official suspension figures stay low, as the suspension is taking place in an isolation room at another school, so doesn’t need to be report as official suspension).

What a win for everyone involved, with their business heads on. Shame the Tesco deal didn’t go through though, poor things. They do have all the trust heads to pay you know!

I should have clarified that the rules I set out only apply to land that was previously in public ownership. The rules are different if the academy was previously a VA school or it is a new school built on land purchased by the academy trust.

Given the rules, I am surprised they were allowed to do as you describe. At the very least, demolishing part of the secondary school should have resulted in a significant reduction in its net capacity.

that all sounds lovely on paper but the reality is very different. I’ve worked there and seen the transformation and it’s criminal. It also means that teachers previous contracts mean nothing and they are subject to new terms… funnily enough none of which benefit them. The most important thing was the resources taken away from the children… and non-existent yet exorbitantly paid SLT to support staff.

The primary school I’m a trustee at is currently meeting with lots of MATs to see if there are any that we’d consider joining. I’m seeing a very wide spread in terms of the financial and the moral aspect of the ones we’ve met so far. Some are genuinely passionate about making a difference in childrens lives, others certainly much more like a business. It’s been incredibly eye opening and it’s a very difficult decision to make. I think with the ever growing pressure on finances it’s definitely something more schools will be investigating.

If the reality is different someone is breaking the law. And no, an academy cannot change teachers contracts at will. TUPE applies. They can use a different contract for new teachers, but they can only change existing contracts in limited circumstances.

Whilst some dispute this, the evidence is that academies have improved educational outcomes for children. After years of slipping down the PISA tables, the UK Is now going up, with England going up since the widespread roll out of academies whilst Scotland (which does not have academies) has gone down. This is why academies have support from both the main parties.

An over simplification.

While academies in England were introduced to improve educational standards, the evidence on their effectiveness is mixed. Some academies have improved outcomes, particularly those in well-managed academy chains, but others have shown little or no improvement compared to local authority schools.

England’s performance in international tests like PISA has improved slightly in recent years, but it’s difficult to attribute this directly to academies due to the many factors influencing education.
Comparisons with Scotland, which has a different educational system and has seen some decline in PISA scores, should be made cautiously.

Both major UK political parties have supported academies at various times, though views differ within each party about their overall impact.

There are MATs that have totally turned around schools that were failing for a generation or more. Within reason I'm more concerned by the academic results than the salaries. If you had Tesco only in Kent and Sainsburys only in Surrey and Morrisons only in Sussex they would overtime become rubbish. If you have the chains we do it is a far better system, I'd far rather have the MAT chains than the LEAs. As birth rates fall some of our schools will close and that's no bad thing as they will be the worst ones that nobody wants to send their child to.

Yes, I work at a fairly small primary school that originally had one headteacher and one deputy. It then became part of a MAT with a CEO, executive headteacher, headteacher and deputy. It has recently joined a larger MAT and now has a CEO, two executive headteachers, one headteacher and no deputy. Alongside all the HR, finance managers etc. The executive headteachers rarely set foot in the classroom. Each time a new school joins it feels like the budget is getting stretched more, rather than providing more resources (which is how it's always sold to us).

All it seems to have done is create more admin and bureaucracy and less funding.

Also good management and good leadership drive up standards, in whatever format of school. What seems to be happening now is that the best headteachers become 'executive' head teachers and seem to become more removed from the day to day running of the school.

There are different ‘flavours’ of academy. There was a point when Outstanding and good Good schools were encouraged to become stand-alone academies - and understandably given the selection of ‘the better schools’ to apply, their results were also ‘better than the average of all schools’.

However, ‘failing’ schools (RI or lower in more than one inspection, IIRC) were forced to join MATs - not joining the ‘good / outstanding’ stand alone academies, but being taken over by chains pretty much established for this purpose. The results were mixed - some schools improved. Some shed all of their problematic students to remaining LA schools through a range of behaviour, uniform and other policies, and thus improved. Some stayed the same. Some declined and were repeatedly rebrokered to other MAT chains. However, overall, the performance of these ‘failed schools forced to academise’ tended to be lower than ‘the average of all schools’ (the political push to stand-alone academisation was based on this, as the Government realised that they needed to balance this by academising lots of high performance schools to be able to claim success for their policy through the device of lumping all academies together in their data)

More recently, in many LAs, the removal of a number of schools into MATs or stand alone academies has reduced the viability of much LA support (in line with the obvious direction of political ‘push’) and thus remaining schools have formed or joined MATs. As LAs cannot open new schools, new schools have been founded by existing academies and MATs. Thus final groyp pf academies have results around the average, as would be expected from their highly mixed nature.

The varied history of academies makes it difficult to analyse the performance of ‘LA schools’ vs ‘Academies’ as a whole, because a) LAs are no longer funded ir supported as they were and b) academies are highly heterogeneous.

Surely reinventing the whole “system” again would cost far too much, especially in this climate.

So what you need is more checks and balances on the top heavy structure in academy chains. I thought Ofsted was somehow going to be inspecting the academy structure, or they were at least looking into it.
If some chains are taking the mick with huge salaries, then yes, it needs more regulation and accountability. But there is no need for a costly reinvention of the entire system. Especially if we do not know how long this current party has in power and who knows what a different ideology would do.
Work with what there is and improve it would be my suggestion.