There is more money going into schools than there ever has been before

[noblegiraffe]

Video of Damian Hinds on the Andrew Marr show here:

twitter.com/marrshow/status/1000670165246267392?s=21

What is it about the DfE that means they start parroting this shit as soon as they sign up? There are more teachers than ever! It remains an attractive profession! Loads of money in schools!

Damian Hinds, sorry, I gave you a chance, but you’re a tosser.

Don’t just cherry pick. Link to the report so we can all read it too.

From what you’ve cherry picked it looks like they’re taking aim at academy chains. Is that the section of the report you got that from?

MissSusanSays

Surely the first question should be
Why is money that should be paying for children's education going to trustees?
The second should be
What are the doing to earn so much money?

You need to understand who the trustees can be. In many cases it is the chief executive / executive headteacher of the school / MAT, who until recently was allowed to be appointed as a Trustee. That is now not considered best practice, so to some extent it is a historical quirk bought about by the DfE not understanding what was best practice.

We would expect to pay for the head teacher of a school, so it is not that much of an issue. Their salaries though in some cases is very much an issue and I agree how do they justify the salary?

admission

state school governors, which is essentially what is this is, are voluntary and not paid.

How can you justify a re-branding and a salary?

Trustees are voluntary and not paid. They cannot generally be paid for acting as a trustee. That would be a breach of charity law. However, they can be paid if they work for the school in the same way as staff governors are paid. They can also be paid if they provide services to the charity, just as a school governor who is a plumber, say, can be paid for providing plumbing services to the school.

As Admission says, the large salaries go to the chief executive/executive head teacher of the school/MAT. Prior to academisation this individual would not have been an unpaid governor. They would have been a paid member of staff.

Prior to academisation this individual would not have been an unpaid governor. They would have been a paid member of staff.

So did/do they get paid to be a governor, or where they a governor that get pays for a different job working at the school?

Two very different things.

Boney I totally agree. Academy chains are really, really not good in general. But I suspect that the underfunding is a way of pushing more schools into the arms of the likes of the Harris academy chain, or even Tudor. The last one is eating up secondary and primary schools in my area at a rate of knots.
The issue is it’s MATs is that they are very top heavy. But it is now almost impossible to survive if you’re not an academy because L.A. support has dried up without the funding from schools that are no academies.

Again, I know of three primaries coming their own MAT as a defensive strategy against takeover from a larger chain.

I would also point out that almost no one outside education knows this is going on. There has been very little about this in the national press.

So did/do they get paid to be a governor, or where they a governor that get pays for a different job working at the school

They did not get paid to be a governor. On the whole they were previously staff governors who therefore were paid as members of the school's staff (predominantly teachers, most commonly head teachers). They are now trustees who are paid as members of the school's staff. They do not get paid to be a trustee. So they have gone from being governors who are paid for doing a different job at the school to being trustees who are paid for doing a different job at the school.

The situation is slightly different for MATs where the chief executive is fulfilling a role that would previously have been filled by someone working for the LA. But that person would still have been funded from the budget for schools.

What the NASUWT report seems to be saying is that school funding is falling (as everyone knows) but also the DfE’s policies of academisation and dropping the ball with regard to financial transparency in the academy sector and neglecting to put a cap on CEO pay has also led to financial mismanagement of schools where teachers and pupils are bearing the brunt of the financial mismanagement while consultants and managers are paid over the odds.

So what are the DfE going to do about it?

prh47bridge

Thanks for that, but £100,000 seems a high price to pay for the position.

noblegiraffe
So what are the DfE going to do about it?

An extremely biased view but, it seems that most academy chains are run by those with connections to (shall we say) people in authority, So why would the dfe rock its own boat?

MissSusanSays

People ignore what is being said because its being said by those "whinging" teachers and the government has done a very good job of putting teachers in a bad light.

For clarity of what salaries are being paid, the salary ranges for headteachers are agreed every year from the 1st September. The salary range depends on the size of the school and would be expected to be kept to for all local authority maintained school, other than there is the ability of the governing board to issue increases of up to 25% of the maximum salary.
For a typical 2 form entry (420 pupil) primary school the maximum salary is £68643 in most of England and £76017 in inner London. For the largest secondary school (1500 pupils + approximately) the salary range is £76466 to £109366 outside London and £83910 to £116,738 in inner London. Most experienced head teachers will be on top of scale, so many LA maintained schools will have a headteacher on £100K+ just as academies will.

admission

Last time I checked it was about 1/5th of heads in LA schools were paid £100K +.

I have no issue with this, I do have issues with CEO type arrangements where they do not oversee the running of schools, yet still sit back and rake in money for doing sweet FA.

But most secondary schools are now academies and one of the academy freedoms was the ability to ignore pay scales.