‘Curb high salaries for academy chiefs’
The secretary of the Maidstone and Swale branch of a teaching union has called for new regulations to curb academy leaders’ extortionate salaries.
Mark Dickinson, of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) made the comments after the lavish benefits package one Kent trust was providing to senior staff was revealed exclusively by the KM last week.
He said: “One of the problems with academies is that you have had a deregulation of state education. Whereas in the past pay scales were agreed nationally, academies have taken it into their own hands.
“Academies will be run by a CEO who is determining their own pay. There seems to be a conflict of interest.”
Academies are given grants by the Department for Education and now get the same amount as an equivalent-sized local authority school, so being able to pay leaders such high sums means lower ranked staff have to get less, says Mr Dickinson.
He said the argument that academy leaders – some of whom are on £250,000 – get paid so much as they are responsible for dozens of schools falls down when you compare their role to that of Kent County Council’s Patrick Leesom who oversees hundreds of schools and gets paid between £140,865 and £193,000.
He said: “There needs to be a nationally agreed pay scale for academies.
“There’s no transparency. What was a transparent system of pay has become very murky and you have to question why.”
Last year there were 6,273 academies in England, 863 more than
‘What was a transparent system of pay has become very murky and you have to question why’
the year before. This equated to 28% of all schools although they employed 44% of all full-time teachers.
Across all schools 94.7% of teachers were qualified, but the numbers varied greatly depending on the type of institution.
At local authority run primary schools 3% of teachers weren’t qualified, compared to 4.8% at academies and 12.3% at free schools. This compared to 4.9%, 7.5% and 11.3% at the equivalent secondaries.
Despite the high salary of academy bosses, staff working at the coal face are actually worse off nationally than colleagues at local authority schools, earning £34,500 on average compared to £35,550.
The amount appears to rise more sharply as academy teachers progress through their careers, with academy staff paid an average of £150 more when they reach senior level.