Multi-Academy Trusts: Salaries

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Thursday 14th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

He is helping himself to a salary of some $7 million per year to promote an extraordinary organisation, which is generating mental health issues among many of our young people—and I will deal with that when answering the next Question.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

Now that the advertising is over, I make the point that in primary as well as secondary academies, head teachers earn on average more than their counterparts in the maintained sector while paying their teaching staff less than teachers’ counterparts in that sector. This is the sort of avarice that results when schools are allowed to abandon national pay scales. The Minister talked about writing to academy trusts and he did so—to those where senior staff earn more than the Prime Minister. But they can ignore him, because he has absolutely no power to compel them to moderate senior pay. It is not just salaries that are out of control in academies. The academy trusts themselves are out of the control of government Ministers; that should not be the case. Will the Government introduce measures to ensure that academy trusts are held fully accountable for the public resources they spend? The next Labour Government will certainly do so.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I do not think the noble Lord understands the degree of scrutiny to which academy trusts are subjected. It is a far higher level of scrutiny than local authority schools receive. They have to submit audited accounts every year; a comparable school in the local authority sector is audited only every three or four years on average, and that information is not published or easily available. So I disagree fundamentally with the noble Lord’s point. Regarding comparable salaries in the two sectors, a head teacher of a secondary academy is on an average of about £92,000 per year compared with £88,000 for a maintained secondary head, but the heads of academy schools have more responsibilities. The noble Lord says that we do not have any leverage but, according to the results of a recent survey, the Kreston report, in the highest of six bands—schools with 5,000 to 10,000 pupils—salaries have fallen from £140,000 to £114,000.