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.

This is the truth.

@prh47bridge
More SEND pupils leave academy trusts. More SEND students are off-rolled.
MATs do worse for SEND students than LEAs.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/big-academy-trusts-see-more-kids-leave-their-schools/

@cabbageking
The university of Birmingham report found that MATs did not provide better economies of scale.
The EPI report found that MATs spend too much money on CEOs, executive heads and marketing and too little on teachers and resources in schools.
Your school may theoretically look like it will get a better deal from the MATs. However, I know teachers that have just joined MATs that are saying they now can't buy paper, books, run trips etc because there is now less money than before. They also have far more admin tasks to do and workload has increased. The money is being spent on the CEOs and executive heads salaries.

How do you know this @aprilwotson ?, how often do you speak to the rank and file teachers in the school you are CofG? I don’t even know the names now of anyone on the governing body of my school, and i have been there years, bizarrely and maybe not coincidentally prior to academisation I knew most of them.

@aprilwotson
It is a scandal if public money is being wasted.
The taxpayer expects their money to be used on frontline services-educating students. They do not want their money wasted on CEOs and executive heads at MATs if they do not provide a better education and all the research shows that they don't. All the research shows that MATs cost more money and have no better outcomes for students. The UCL report says that countries with better educational outcomes have a consistent local approach to education, which is what LEAs can provide.
Let's stop wasting money on MATs.

It's a free school, so has been an academy since it opened. The staff didn't just accidentally stumble into their jobs without knowing that - they chose it for the ethos. Our staff satisfaction scores are very high, and staff wellbeing is a priority.

I'm sorry if your experience of academies is more shitty than at my school, but teachers do generally have the option to move schools if they're not happy. It's an employees' market right now.

Our Trust is a disgrace. People in suits earning a fortune, making decisions that make our jobs harder yet so far removed from the reality of teaching that it’s embarrassing.

The practical problem is that many ‘historically good / outstanding’ schools aren’t in MATs - they are individual standards alone academies, who buy some services from the LA if they choose to, and others on the open market. They may well not choose to return to the LA control they chose to escape (at least partly because historically as LA schools they had less need of LA support than other schools and saw not belonging to LAs as better value for money).

So the only schools ‘available’ to be returned to LA control are more recent academisers or historically failing schools. The services provided by LAs have been decimated, and the education system as a whole is dramatically underfunded. So without an enormous, instant influx of cash , we would simply be returning ‘mainly average and below’ schools to the care of … nobody much.

You may be right that if all schools were returned to LA control, all LAs were fully staffed with experts and all school funding was restored to ‘LA-only’ times in real terms (so a huge increase on today’s eroded per pupil funding), that might improve schools. The fact remains there is no route, political will or - most importantly- money to do so.

@cantkeepawayforever
Yes, it is a slow process to move schools back to LEAs but it should be done based on the evidence. 280 schools moved trusts in the year 2023-2024. Gradually, we should move schools back to LEAs to save the taxpayer money and to provide a consistent local approach to schooling, which the UCL report says is better.

@aprilwotson
And so many teachers in MATs do move school or leave teaching altogether. That is yet another disgrace of MATs that schools are losing teachers and the profession forever.

The problem us that you are imagining the LA is ‘there to receive these schools’. It is not. In all the areas I am familiar with, the LA has no capacity to support schools at all, with a skeleton staff barely managing statutory EHCP paperwork and no more.

As the first school to transfer back to the LA from a trust will, by definition, be dramatically failing (that’s why schools move trusts) and have a huge need for support of all kinds, the LA would need to be fully re-skilled and re-staffed from School 1 … but will only have 1 school’s worth of additional funding.

No, they move from an academy or LA-maintainef school they don't like to an academy or LA-maintained school that they do like. Job done.

It’s an absolute scandal. But Gove’s just got a peerage so he must have been right, no?

I'm lucky.
We have a (decimated) LA school improvement team ( reduced from about 100 advisers to 15, over 10 years) but nevertheless they do have a core offer to all maintained schools and an additional offer to those schools evaluated as causing concern. Schools have named advisers who support leaders to improve outcomes (in the widest sense).

You are right. It has been a viscious circle. Less money to LA’s, Conservatives removed designated grants, school improvement teams redundant, offer to schools lessened, schools opted out, money to LA’s lessened ( less schools) as did the service and more schools opted out…

Of course some school leaders also followed their other local schools. Self appointed MAT leaders, less challenge, a cosy world with less oversight than an objective, much checked by democtratically elected members, LA.

No they don't, they leave the profession.

You haven't read headlines about teacher retention, the stats on teachers leaving the profession, or the massive Facebook group ‘Life After Teaching - Exit the Classroom and Thrive…with 174.3k members….?

I have to say similar has happened in our school trust. Normal members of staff previously now have important titles, drive around in personalised plated SUVs and have plush offices separate to the school building. It hasn’t gone down well I have to say.

Of course I've read the headlines. I know teachers are leaving the profession, but that is not because academies exist.

Luckily there are still many teachers who aren't quitting, and they have the choice to move to schools that align with their own personalities and values.

I don't know about every MAT but I do know about some of the very large ones and I feel they manipulate both data and operations to suit their agenda - the government do not seem to delve very deep, its all superficial. Even Ofsted look superficially - schools swamped with staff from the trust during inspections - which is not the day to day reality. Staff and students pushed to conform to a very regimented style.

I do think lack of oversight of MATs is an issue. A national payscale - like the Burgundy Book but encompassing scales up to the leadership of Trusts of different sizes - and benchmarks of percentage of non-teaching MAT staff compared with total Trust staff would be a goid starting point, as would direct Ofsted inspection of MATs rather than just their constituent schools.

Absolutely agree. Our MAT has promoted a clique to Trust Improvement Leads, who now spend very little time in the classroom. The drive from school to school telling us all what they think we should be doing. Meanwhile, there’s no money for T.A’s in the classroom where we really need them. The Government need to wake up and do something. It’s scandalous.

@aprilwotson you have not answered my question at all. Just because your school was part of a start up mat doesn’t mean the teachers agree with it, and I still want to know how many of the on the ground/ regular teachers you talk to on a repeated basis.
You also talk about it being an employees market, this is very far from the truth. I went onto tes, and put in a 50 mile radius. Whilst being slightly rural, 50 miles gives me several conurbations. I am a STEM teacher and it found me one job opportunity.

Wow that’s eye opening OP thankyou - you are right. So the academies get govt funding and decide how to spend it all, including how much their own salaries should be? Explains so much! How is this not being more widely discussed?!!
Do you think teachers appreciate this?

Yep, sums it up. There is DfE oversite, but in practice this is shockingly poor with no real action. The area this person covers is vast to no local knowledge or intel on the ground. No evaluation of wider impact on other local schools.

Just google trust mismanagement of funds where they have run up significant debts under DfE watch.

We have many MATS set up by a group of HT’s, their own chosen people as trustees, a self appointed CEO, everything in house. Little challenge as everyone knows everyone to well. Why would you choose to have trustees that are going to challenge and make life a little more difficult through expectation.

They are called MATES MATS for a reason!

Couldn't agree more. What stuns me is the amount of people that can't or won't see it. MATS will be something we look back on in the future and be shocked it ever happened.

No we think it is a disgrace. Well we do in my neck of the woods. However reading another thread I started. There are many that don't agree.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5297106-to-dispise-mats-multi-academy-trusts?page=5&reply=143637965

It amazes me that this is possible. I don't know anything about how academy funding works but surely it should include safeguards like "you will get this much money per pupil, you will employ at minimum this many teachers per pupil, you will employ at minimum this many TAs, you will maintain buildings to standard X" and after that there shouldn't be any money left over for exorbitant management salaries?

The privatised railway, which also receives government funds, places extremely detailed requirements on the train-operating companies: restricting what trains they can buy, what services they need to run, etc etc. Are schools not in the same boat?

@JaffavsCookie the CEO and advisors from our MAT (who are/were all senior teachers before joining the MAT as either full or part time advisors) are in very regular communication with our staff. Staff are also in contact with each other and with their union rep, who has a good relationship with the Headteacher.

As a volunteer local governor with a full time job I nevertheless go in to school about once a week in addition to the governor meetings, committees, helping with staff interviews and supporting events. So yes, I'm a familiar face around school, and most of the other local governors are too. I know governors aren't visible in all schools, but that isn't influenced by whether a school is an academy or not. School governors are volunteers, so the quality varies. LA-maintained schools may have one elected local councillor or LA-appointed rep on their governing body, but that doesn't make them any more effective. In my experience (of other schools in the past) LA appointees see themselves as the eyes & ears of the LA but do not contribute much. They attend some meetings but are rarely in school.

If you were in my area you would find dozens of STEM vacancies within a 50 mile radius. I'm sorry you have less choice. But you would also have less choice if your school was maintained by a shitty LA and surrounded by other shitty LAs.