Former Nottingham council leader says academy trusts spending too much on ‘high-paid’ executives

The former leader of Nottingham City Council says some school academy trusts are spending too much money on “high-paid chief executives” – when they could better use the money to help tackle record numbers of exclusions.

The comments from Cllr David Mellen come as figures reveal Nottingham currently has some of the highest numbers of permanently excluded school pupils ever seen in the city.

If the rates continue to increase the council warns numbers will become so high the authority is “unlikely” to be able to meet its legal requirements on providing education to children.

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In the last academic year alone more than 200 pupils in the city needed what is known as Alternative Provision (AP) – meaning they cannot be educated in mainstream schools because they have been excluded.

The council commissions the Raleigh Education Trust to place excluded children through Denewood and Unity Academy, however despite the number of spaces at Denewood increasing from 42 to 70, the service is now full.

During a Children and Young People Scrutiny Committee meeting on Wednesday (November 13), concerns over how some academy trusts were helping to tackle the issue were raised by councillors.

Cllr David Mellen (Lab), the former leader of the council, who also previously worked as a headteacher, said: “I’ve seen in the past that half the excluded children come from two or three schools. I don’t believe some children in one part of the city are more difficult to manage than in others. I think that is a lack of skill and management.

“It comes down to the academy chain and their attitude. We’ve got a fragmented system in our country where we have chief executives of academy chains who earn more than any person in this organisation, and yet are unaccountable to the public and can exclude children in a way that seems at a higher level than other people running schools in similar areas.

“I think it is a bit of a national outrage that people can accept those kinds of salaries in organisations where they have got their head of finance, head of HR, head of property, and everything else. The money is not going to the children, the money is going to high-paid academy chief executives.

“I’m not saying they are all bad people doing bad jobs. Some are doing a good job, but we’ve got to a situation where we used to have a director of education who had staff and a team, who could support schools and actually the rate of exclusion was much less. We are not in that situation any more.”

A 2023 report by the Campaign for State Education (CASE) – a pressure group opposed to the academy system – concluded the academies sector “is wasting many millions of pounds of public money on high salaries for academy trust managers, compared to the situation in local authorities overseeing non-academy maintained schools”.

The 50 largest trusts nationwide spent £68.2 million, or £80 per pupil, on six-figure salaries for their employees in 2021-2022, the report notes, compared to £24.4 million, or £28 per pupil, in local authority-maintained schools.

According to reports, some academy chief executives are paid upwards of £400,000 per year. Speaking after the meeting Cllr Mellen said while the academisation of schools was instigated by Tony Blair’s Labour Government, the intention was never to reach the point where “the assumption is all schools should be an academy”.

He said academy trusts will be asked to attend council scrutiny committee meetings in the future, adding: “They are not scrutinised in the same way as local authorities.”

Cllr Cheryl Barnard (Lab), executive member for children, young people and education, said she has been “concentrating” on academy-run schools where exclusion rates are particularly high. These include Bulwell Academy and Ellis Guilford, which are both run by the London-based Creative Education Trust.

Cllr Mellen also says he is concerned academy chains often run numerous schools across the country – like the Creative Education Trust – and therefore “do not have a Nottingham focus”.

In March the Department for Education gave the green light for the Raleigh Learning Trust’s new £20m Alternative Provision free school, the ‘Bowden Academy’. Speaking during the meeting Liz Browne, executive principal for alternative education at the trust, said the new school is “exciting” for the city.

“We are currently in the process of getting a site and then [the build] is over two years,” she said. "The strategy with Raleigh and the local authority is to bring those exclusions down with early intervention places.”

However Cllr Mellen added: “I don’t know whether to cry that you’ve got a 100-place AP school coming, or to be excited. You’re in that role and I can understand why you are excited, but it’s not a good reflection of our city that we need that.

“Good schools can, within their structures, work out ways of keeping children within their school.” The Creative Education Trust was contacted for comment.