Ninety-four trusts sent letters asking them to justify high pay for heads and executives

The Department for Education has embarked on a new effort to persuade school academy chains to tackle their executives’ high pay after trust managers proved largely resistant to previous attempts.

The DfE said the head of its education and skills funding agency had written to 94 academy trusts asking them to justify high pay for executives and headteachers, including 63 academies paying several staff more than £100,000 a year.

It said it would write again to 31 trusts that failed to properly respond to the DfE’s previous attempts to seek justification for high salaries. According to the DfE’s figures, fewer than one in four of the 213 trusts previously contacted have taken action to curb executive pay.

The concern comes as pressure grows on the government over school funding, including criticism from Conservative MPs and headteachers.

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Lord Agnew, the schools minister in the House of Lords, said: “[It is] encouraging that 50 trusts have responded to our request to justify and revise high salaries, but I am determined to continue publicly challenging the minority that are not complying.”

The DfE has not identified the trusts that have been sent letters, but a freedom of information request by Schools Week last year found the group that trimmed executive pay included several in financial difficulties and one that was in the process of being wound up.

This week’s letter is the fourth from the DfE on the subject. In 2017, the department wrote to trustees of academy trusts running just one school with at least one member of staff earning more than £150,000 a year; in 2018, it wrote to a further 87 multi-academy trusts paying staff more than £150,000; and in February this year, the DfE wrote another letter to 28 trusts, including some with two or more staff earning above £100,000.

Multi-academy trusts are charities that run chains of state schools that have converted into academies. The government has encouraged their growth since 2012 but parents complain their children’s schools are managed by anonymous organisations without links to the local community.

About 8,300 of the more than 20,000 state schools in England are academies, including most mainstream secondary schools and a rising proportion of primaries.

Some trusts have been accused of predatory tactics in recruiting schools maintained by local authorities. In a small number of cases, the trusts have gone bust or been stripped of schools by the DfE.

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Trusts receiving the latest letters will have to provide information on 12 aspects of their pay policies, including a rationale for setting salary levels and evidence that its decisions are in line with the government’s guidelines.

Those trusts that ignored previous requests have been asked to provide details of “succession planning for highly-paid staff where trusts intend to reduce the level of salary in future”.

Teaching union leaders said the effort reveals “how utterly feeble” the government’s powers are to moderate academy executive pay, with a recent investigation finding that 23 chain chief executives were paid more than £200,000.