How are the Academy Trusts funded?

125 school trusts paying staff more than £150,000 Bumper pay-offs surge 9% in year to total £63.7m

AT least 125 school bosses at academy trusts are pocketing more than £150,000 a year.

Their earnings are on a par with Theresa May – paid £151,451 as Prime Minister in the last financial year – and the revelation comes as hard-up schools beg parents to chip in for stationery.

The Tories slipped out the annual accounts of academy trusts quietly last week, in parliamentary recess.

Figures show 125 are handing the bumper deals to at least one director or headteacher. But the total number could be higher as they only have to declare if anyone is on over £150,000 – not how many. Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner said: “The Tories have thrown money at an academy and free school programme that isn’t working, while individual schools have budgets cut year after year.

“Meanwhile, some executives at large academy chains are earning fatcat salaries from taxpayers’ money, even as parents are asked to donate for textbooks and stationery. With schools ACADEMY trusts and local authorities get most of their cash from the Dedicated Schools Grant.

In July, academy trusts paying at least one person over £150,000 were ordered to explain why. Any ignoring struggling financially following years of cuts, there are serious questions to answer about runaway remuneration.”

Education Secretary Damian Hinds has now ordered all academy trusts to provide written justification of large pay deals ahead of a crackdown next year.

The figures also show a 9% rise in big pay-offs to staff. Nearly 6,000 exit packages were agreed, worth £63.7million, up the request face being penalised in a “financial capability assessment” to be launched next year or 2020. The new rules will strengthen financial oversight criteria and make it easier to clamp down on trusts wasting cash. Amount that school budgets have dipped in real terms in 3 years from £58.6million the year before. Meanwhile, school budgets are £1.7billion lower in real terms than three years ago. Experts fear high wages will become the norm if left unchallenged.

Mr Hinds said high pay can be justified to attract the “best people” but it must be “proportionate” to ensure value for money for the public purse. And he insists the academy system is “more transparent” than the old local authority education system and encourages “innovation”. Labour has said it will halt development of academies and turn existing ones back into local authority schools. QUESTIONS Rayner