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.

“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.”

Yes OK, but I understand that some may want to do that. Many have been teachers and then head teachers (dealing with day to day issues, staffing, parental complaints, safeguarding, budgets primarily) but they have an underlying passion and energy for education as a whole/whole society approach and how to improve it, and reach as many children/families as possible - so if they can do that effectively, as executive heads and improve education, then I think that is a good thing.
It is a form of career progression for the most successful and ambitious, it is not necessarily a bad thing, if it attracts some real talent into education.

Also there is a huge shortfall in terms of headteacher recruitment in many areas. Sharing a good head across multiple schools is better (on average) than 1 school having a good head and 3 others having none, though it is obviously worse for the 1 school.

Hi @Araminta1003 my point was about becoming more removed from the classroom. Yes it attracts people and a nice career progression arc I'm sure, but it's a sadness that the most inspirational headteachers end up having little to do with the children. Where I am there is also a shortage of headteachers. It's like a flaw in the career progression design model.

@prh47bridge Research shows that multi-academy trusts do no better than LEA schools but they cost much more. In fact LEA schools have slightly better Ofsted ratings, lower staff turnover, and have better outcomes for disadvantaged students.

https://neu.org.uk/press-releases/large-multi-academy-trusts-have-lowest-teacher-retention-rates

• Last academic year, large MATs saw 1 in 5 teachers leave their jobs and more than 1 in 9 teachers leave the teaching profession entirely. This compares poorly with local-authority maintained schools, where over the same period 1 in 7 teachers left their jobs and 1 in 11 teachers left the teaching profession.
• Among large MATs - defined as those containing at least 21 schools - the rate of leaving the profession has remained consistently higher than in other governance structures over the past 10 years.
• Free schools and academies have higher rates of teachers leaving the profession than local-authority maintained primary, secondary, and special schools.

Fragmentation of the system is a problem, which the UCL report below points out. They suggest that within a region, there should be one consistent and coordinated approach at a local level-this is what a local education authority provides.
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10079272/1/Understanding%20the%20Middle%20Tier%20-%20Comparative%20Costs%20of%20Academy%20and%20LA-maintained%20School%20Systems%20%20-%20Sara%20Bubb%20Associates%2016%20July%202019.pdf

@Mischance
Thanks for posting this Guardian article so that more people understand how scandalous multi-academy trusts are in siphoning of public money that should be spent in schools.
The article says "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...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"

This is the same in my area. The LEA used to run roughly 100 schools and the director of children's services comparatively earnt much less than the CEOs of the multi-academy trusts who are only running 15 schools sometimes.

The government must take action to prevent this scandalous misuse of public money. Many CEOs of multi-academy trusts and their many executive heads justify their positions by creating more administrative tasks for schools that just increase workload rather than improving outcomes.

I know of a CEO of a MAT who purchased two private jet skis for his personal use and put them through the school as a school expense.

my SEN son got illegally off-roles from a MAT and turns out you can’t really complain about it. They also had a TA aged just 21 with no qualifications above GCSE and just a DBS taking the class alone for a few months while the teacher was off sick.

The LA have no power over them.

We are hearing about good MATs and bad MATs, what some do and what others do etc. But the simple fact is that they cost a load in management and they are wholly UNNECESSARY.

@Mischance you are sounding very anachronistic. More than 80% of secondary schools are now academies and around 43% of primaries. Using capital letters to express your political frustration on Mumsnet is not going to turn the tide. Some of those schools were forced to convert, but many did it voluntarily because they wanted autonomy from mediocre (or worse) local authority control

It has certainly had positive outcomes in my area.

84% of schools rated inadequate by Ofsted are academies.
The EPI report (2017-2020) found that only 39% of multi-academy trusts perform above the national average.
One leader of a trust running 50 schools only earns more money than the combined salary of the director of children's services, director of finance and the chief executive of local authorities running 150 schools.
The public accounts committee 2023 says they are concerned over the lack of financial transparency in multi-academy trusts.
As I said multi academy trusts cost considerably but they are not delivering. Public money must be redirected into schools not into CEO and executive heads pockets.

Unfortunately it has not been at all positive in my area and I deeply resent the vast quantities of money that have been (and are being) poured into this unnecessary structure.

I am well aware that academizarion has already gobbled up the majority of schools, but it is not what teachers want and does not enhance their ability to do their jobs in any way.

As a primary COG I have been steeped in this conundrum for years watching teacher morale fall and costs go up.

Just because it has taken hold does not mean that it is right.

MAT management are literally stealing money from our children.

I've been amazed for years why more parents don't protest about this.

The public accounts committee 2023 says they are concerned over the lack of financial transparency in multi-academy trusts.
As I said multi academy trusts cost considerably but they are not delivering. Public money must be redirected into schools not into CEO and executive heads pockets.

Indeed so ......

"it is not what teachers want"

It may not be what some teachers want, but it is certainly what other teachers want. That is very clear from my perspective as a CoG of a secondary academy, in an area where all of the secondaries are academies, and all of the academy trusts are led by former teachers.

@prh47bridge 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?

The academy chain near me gets superlative results, better than any other school in the area, with a very mixed intake. And the CEO, Peter Hughes, earns at least £170,000 (that was the most recent figure I could find based on Mossbourne Federation's accounts filed at Companies House, and that was from 2019, so it has probably gone up since then).

I wouldn't send my kids there if you paid me. Their methods of getting those results are under investigation after many complaints from parents and former students. See this thread for details.

Are saying you would send them there if it was a community school? The ethos there is due to the senior leadership team's values, not because it is an academy. You assume that a local authority wouldn't sanction that ethos, but it seems pretty popular with the local families who send their children there. LA's are run by politicians, and politicians like things that are popular.

Also, the school decides its ethos, not the LA. People often talk about LA controlled schools, but community schools are not really LA controlled. The governors decide. The LA appoints one governor. The rest are not LA appointed. In most matters, the LA has no power to override decisions made by the governors.

If you look at that linked thread, you'll see that part of the problem is accountability. The academy trust marks its own homework.

No they don't. You are peddling a myth. Academy trusts are accountable to the DfE, who can remove them and replace them if they underperform. The DfE were not able to remove and replace underperforming local authority leadership teams, which is exactly why many school leadership teams wanted to academise.

@aprilwotson
The public accounts committee 2023 said they were concerned about the lack of financial transparency and communication with parents in multi-academy trusts.
Another University of Birmingham report looking at the finances of MATs found that they did not achieve as good economies of scale as LEAs. They also spend more on back office functions e.g CEO and executive head salaries and less on teachers and resources in the actual schools than LEA schools. MATs also do not consider the local picture when making decisions. The UCL report highlights how better education systems have a consistent unified approach at a local area level. This means that schools that are in failing academy trusts should not be moved to a different trust as thousands are each year but be moved back to LEAs.

Have they improved educational outcomes for all individual children though or are outcomes improved when looking at a school as a whole? I think a lot of the “improvement” comes from schools becoming more selective and less inclusive about taking Sen children, or taking them but then off rolling them. So if you can get rid of your worst performing children/ children that take up the most resources then the school as a whole will improve on paper.

Yes, there have been various studies, as there should be, but nothing conclusive enough to label academisation as a "scandal". The Labour manifesto pledged to reduce some of the freedoms of academies, to keep their left wing happy, but there is no appetite to bring them all back under LA control.

It’s utterly shit. I HATE working as part of a multi academy trust and it’s going to push me out of teaching.
CEO salary, school improvement leads, multiple staff working in finance, health and safety teams etc but we are having TLRs taken away, are unable to move up the pay scale and TAs are being made redundant. We frequently run out of paper and I haven’t been able to use school funds for resources in years.

This! Why do we need a head, deputy and assistant head all in non teaching roles?!

MATs are a scandal. Ours is a cesspit of nepotism, cronyism, empire building and waste. They all work from home using the best IT equipment and replicating for the most part work already being done in schools. This is while schools count every penny. They've made not one single difference to exam results or the quality of teaching and learning and spend money on ridiculous expenses like you wouldn't believe. Can you tell I'm not a fan 🤣.

This used to be a valid criticism with the older sponsored academies. Most academies now are not sponsored. They have a lower exclusion rate for SEN children than community schools.

In our LA, many schools are looking for Academy partners because the Council can no longer provide their services at a responsible cost. We know next year several services will stop. The Council's top slice to provide these services is over double the cost that most academies are quoting

Talking to other schools, there are many who do not want to join an academy but understand they may have to otherwise they will be laying off TA's and other staff.

They can provide central services at a much cheaper rate and claim back 80% of the business rates, which we can not.

If Councils provided better value, many would be unlikely to leave them but many councils are struggling to offer a good service at a good price.