Our education correspondent, GENE BRODIE, on how a publicly-funded academy chain is failing to pay support staff inner London Living Wage while expecting teachers to work an extra 16 hours per week unpaid – yet its Croydon-based CEO is on a salary of £485,000
Doing well: Harris Federation schools are thriving under CEO ‘Sir’ Dan Moynihan – who’s pocketing £485,000 per year
More than 1,000 teachers and support staff in the Harris Federation academy chain of schools, including many working in Croydon, have signed a letter urging the leadership to negotiate improvements to their pay and conditions.
The Harris Federation is country’s second-largest academy chain, with more than 40,000 pupils at its schools. Harris operates out of offices in Wellesley Road’s Norfolk House, with Sir Dan Moynihan – the former head at Harris’s Crystal Palace academy – its CEO.
Since 2016, Moynihan’s salary has risen by nearly £100,000, to a minimum of £485,000 following his most recent pay hike. Moynihan’s latest 6% pay rise is higher than the 5% increase most teachers saw in 2022–2023 – prompting concerns the disparity could impact “the morale and wellbeing of the lowest paid”.
Harris describes itself as a “not-for-profit charity”. With half a million being skimmed off annually just for Sir Dan’s pay packet, the organisation is evidently using charitable status to the very best advantage for some of its most seni0r employees.
Harris operates five primary schools in Croydon and five secondaries. Such academies are outside local authority control, even though the Department for Education continues to pick up the bills, seeing public education effectively privatised.
The site’s editor, Warwick Mansell, reports that that the staff letter “sets up a significant challenge” to Harris, which has “sector-leading academic and Ofsted results but also sky-high executive pay and a reputation for working its staff hard”.
Flagship: Harris City Academy in Crystal Palace once had Moynihan as its headteacher
Education Uncovered outlines the teachers’ concerns as including “increasing the amount of planning, preparation and assessment time teachers receive”; “ensuring that teachers do not work beyond the 1,265 hours a year of ‘directed time’ which features in the national contract”; “ensuring automatic pay progression for teachers”; and “paying all support staff a salary at least in line with the inner-London living wage of £23,300”.
The notion that a government-funded education organisation is failing to pay London Living Wage will come as a shock to many parents of pupils at Harris academies.
The letter’s demands are based on a survey conducted last year by the teachers’ union, the NEU. The survey found 55% of Harris teachers said they felt stressed at work “very often”, while the figure was 49% for Harris support staff.
Many of the problems over time pressures, stress and preparation appears to stem from the fact that, although there are requirements specified within teachers’ national contracts, Harris as an academy is not required to follow national pay and conditions.
The teachers’ national contract limits workers to 1,265 hours per year on which they can be directed to perform tasks, such as teaching lessons or attending meetings.
Education Uncovered reports: “The NEU says it tracked one Harris school where directed time for members amounted to some 200 hours over this limit – which works out at six weeks’ working time – while a figure of 100 hours over the limit, or three weeks, was not uncommon.”
The union says that there are Harris schools where headteachers are supportive of staff, having workloads which were more reasonable.
Full-time workers, including teachers, are usually expected to work 36.6 hours per week. In 2019, a study for the Department for Education found “secondary teachers and middle leaders” across England worked 49.1 hours during a term-time week.
Public costs, private profits: Haling Park is one of five Harris primaries in Croydon, and was built using millions of pounds of public money. Harris Federation has accumulated reserves of £33million
According to the Education Uncovered report on Harris schools, “In general across the trust teachers are often facing severe workloads… Last autumn’s survey found that teacher members reporting working an average of 53 hours per week during term time.”
NEU members are urging Harris to instigate a “clear process that ensures that all schools consult on and publish a directed time calendar in the summer term. No teacher should be directed to work more than 6.66 hours per day on average across 190 days”.
And the website reports, “The union is also calling for teachers to be able to progress automatically up the pay spine.
“Union sources said that Harris had changed its policy on pay progression within the last year, leading to increased concerns that many staff were not seeing their wages increase as they gained experience.”
The Harris pay progression statistics also revealed gender, ethnicity and age disparities, the report says.
“Harris… was now explicitly linking pay progression to pupil results,” the report states.
The NEU also claims that overseas teachers working at Harris have come together to table their own list of requests to management. These include financial support for their relocation into England and Harris paying for their Qualified Teacher Status application.
Education Uncovered says that “such staff could be paid £10,000 less [at Harris], as unqualified teachers, than those on the main teacher scale”.
The Harris Federation, meanwhile, pays its top earners very, very well.
Harris has long been out on its own in the sector, in terms of the number of its staff paid well over £100,000 a year. According to the Federation’s latest annual accounts (for 2022 to 2023), in addition to Moynihan, it had seven others paid at least £190,000; one was paid £240,000 to £250,000, another on £230,000 to £240,000.
Union sources said the federation was also paying 70 “consultants” some £60,000 each.
Harris’s accounts report an “operatinal surplus” for the year of £6.3million, with accumulated operational reserves of £33.2million.
The majority of this will be funded from grants of public money received from the DfE.
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