‘Link pay of vice chancellors to size of their university’
VICE-CHANCELLORS’ salaries should be linked to the size of the universities they run, a watchdog said yesterday.
Institutions with ‘less responsibility’ should pay their bosses more modestly, Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of the Office for Students (OfS), told MPs. The new higher education regulator, which will begin work in April, has the job of holding universities to account on management pay.
Miss Dandridge’s recommendation follows the scandal at Bath University, which paid the highest salary for a vice- chancellor in the country. Dame Glynis Breakwell earned £468,000 last year – a pay rise of £18,000 on the previous year. Nearby Bath Spa University – one of the smallest in Britain – paid outgoing vice-chancellor Christina Slade £808,000, including a golden goodbye worth almost £500,000.
Yesterday, Miss Dandridge told the Commons education select committee that universities which pay vast amounts would have to explain themselves. Asked if pay should be linked to performance, she said: ‘Yes, and also linked to the size of the organisation you are running – some are huge, billion-pound international operations and some have far less responsibility. It must be linked in some transparent way to performance. That must be right.
‘There is a sense in which some senior salaries have got out of kilter and there is a legitimate public concern about some of the salaries.
‘We are proposing that anyone paid more than £150,000 per year will be required to justify it, and the OfS will look at that justification to make sure that it is appropriate.
‘There is an issue that needs to be addressed and it is something that we at the Office for Students, I think, have to take very seriously.’
‘We are waiting to see whether the sector can seriously address levels of pay and ensure they are justified. If they are not, the OfS will have to intervene. We have an array of tools and responses available to us to deal with it.’