The Harris Federation is a multi-academy trust and ‘not-for-profit’ charity. With 52 academies in London and Essex, the Federation, according to government statistics, educated 34,888 pupils in 2023-24 for which the government paid it £267 million, that is £7,646 for every pupil. The Federation employs some 5,000 staff and operates in Croydon five primary schools, five secondary schools and three six forms. Its HQ is in Croydon and it has three ‘sponsors’: Lord Harris, his wife and his son.
In 2016, the Department for Education when comparing the performance of different multi-academy trusts acclaimed the Harris Federation a “top performer” in primary and secondary education. In July 2016, researchers at the Education Policy Institute found that “at primary level the Harris Federation is the highest performing school group in England. In 2018, the Department for Education ranked Harris the top performing large trust for the progress made by its pupils and for the progress made by its disadvantaged pupils. The Sutton Trust has consistently found the Harris Federation to be amongst “the best academy chains (for) having a transformational impact on pupils’ life chances”. So what’s not to like?
In 2015 it was revealed that Harris Academies had some of the highest turnover of staff amongst schools in the UK, with The Guardian reporting that over a third of Harris teachers leave after just one year. The Anti-Academies Alliance attributed this high turnover to poor working conditions, excessive workload and unreasonable pressure on teachers from ‘senior leadership’. Post-Covid, little seems to have changed. Warwick Mansell writes in the current edition of the NEU magazine, Educate, that NEU reps report that staff are at breaking point, slogging through 12-hour days plus weekends. A petition signed by more than a thousand NEU members has been presented to the Federation asking for improvements in working conditions. Meanwhile, at the apex of the ‘senior leadership’ team responsible for sweating the teaching staff, six executives enjoy annual remuneration in excess of £240,000 and the CEO (Sir Daniel Moynihan) is rewarded with an annual salary of £560,000. These salaries mimic the inflated salaries found in the corporate sector where the beneficiaries, according to George Monbiot, adhere to a ‘self-attribution fallacy’[i] under which they see their inflated salaries as fair reward for their unique intelligence, creativity or drive. A more plausible explanation is the less praiseworthy ability to secure the job in competition with similar talentless, individuals.
The Harris Federation may formally be a ‘not-for-profit charity’, but, looked at objectively, it is a business that first achieves a profit by squeezing teachers and ancillary staff and then dissipates that profit in salaries to its ‘senior leadership’. It is not a charity in any recognisable meaning of the term. As a business which takes government money, the salaries of its executives would be subject to the ceiling proposed by Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader of the Labour Party: no more than 20 times the pay of the lowest paid employee. Corbyn’s proposal was, however, arguably much too lenient for a business like Harris which is totally dependent on the government for income and which employs and depends on a large proportion of skilled professionals (teachers). For such a business, a salary ceiling for executives of no more than five times that of the lowest paid employee would seem quite generous enough provided the lowest paid staff are not excluded from the calculation by subcontracting their services.
Reference
George Monbiot, How Did We Get Into This Mess? Verso, 2017.
Croydon Communists 