Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bousted Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

I am only repeating what was in print; I do not know why. Clearly, when one looks at the academies, one can see the tremendous success and improvement to education to the benefit of children in this country. Control of schools by central government clearly and empirically is not the answer, so I hope the Government will listen to my noble friend Lady Barran, whose dedication to this sector I salute, and agree with her amendments.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not want to prolong the debate, but I have to answer the charge that it is simply the academies that are improving standards in education, and maintained schools are not. Research in the area does not show that to be the case. Since 2017, I think, the Education Policy Institute has had a yearly look at the performance of academies and state schools. Last week I looked at the one for this year and, although I cannot remember the exact figures, the general conclusion was the same that it has been every year: there are some very good academy chains and there are some poor academy chains; there are some very good maintained schools, and some are doing less well. When you look at the results in the round, there is no premium, overall, for the academy sector.

The noble Lord may shake his head, but I will happily write to him with the research. I do not want to prolong things, but I just could not sit here and take that remark again. I thought we had discussed it over dinner; now I am saying it in the Committee so that it is on the record. It is simply untrue to say that all the improvement is in one sector of schools and that there is no improvement in maintained schools. That simply is not the case; the evidence and the research simply do not support that.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I shall briefly talk generally about all these amendments, which I and my party are not supporting. I ought to declare an interest as a governor of the King’s Academy, Liverpool. I was there at the beginning, when academies were started for a particular reason by the then Labour Government in very deprived communities and were then seized on by the coalition Government, including by David Laws from my party. We would sit through endless meetings, where there were always attacks on the maintained sector, about how wonderful the academies were. I never, during those early days—or even recently—heard the noble Lord, Lord Nash, who is not in his place, or the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, who is not in his place, say, “This academy is doing a really good job but, guess what? This maintained school is doing a really good job”. I never heard any criticism of any other academy. People can nod their heads, but if you look at the record, that was the case.

I remember us pushing, for example, that we should inspect multi-academies. Oh no, we could not do that. I remember trying to suggest that we have an external look at the finances of multi-academy trusts—“Oh no, you can’t do that”. Thank goodness, we have moved on considerably since those days, and I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, because, during her time as Education Minister, she went to visit maintained schools, and her language and the language of her party has changed considerably. I very much appreciate that. If there is a breach—I am not sure how serious or how weak the breaches are—the Secretary of State should be looking at it and making the final decision. It should not be just left to the academy or the multi-academy trusts themselves.

One recalls that “Panorama” documentary about how proprietors of academies—it was a limited number, thank goodness—were ensuring that some of the work for their academies was going to companies that they owned and that were their own companies. So a repair or construction company would get the work from that academy. It would not go out for tender. There was a big scandal on “Panorama” about it. If that is wrong, action needs to be taken. I do not know what these breaches are, or how serious or wide they are, but it should not be just left to the academy to sort out. It should be sorted out by the Secretary of State and by her Minister in the House of Lords.

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Moved by

[Baroness Bousted]

447A: Schedule 3, page 128, line 24, at end insert—
“1A In section 120(1)(a), after “teachers”, insert—“(aa) academy schools Chief Executive Officers’ pay,””

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I am aware that it is very late at night indeed. I have waited a long time to bring the amendment but, anyhow, it is not a long speech. The amendment is very simple. It makes one addition to the Bill, and that is to bring chief executive officer pay, usually of a multi-academy trust, but it might be of a single academy trust, under the remit of the School Teachers’ Review Body. This is a necessary step to advance the good use of public money in the provision of education for the nation’s children.

As we know, this is, or at least it was, a cross-party concern. My noble friend Lord Agnew is not here, but when he served as Academies Minister in the last Government, he was highly concerned about the apparently exponential rise in the pay of multi-academy trust CEOs. Indeed, so grave was his concern that, on two occasions, I think, he wrote to the chair of trustees of MATs that were awarding what he considered to be excessive pay rises to their CEOs and called them into his office to meet them and hear the justification for the awards. If he were here, I would have assured my noble friend that I would have very much liked to be a fly on the wall at those meetings.

In 2018, my noble friend wrote a letter to the chairs of academy trusts in England saying:

“I want to emphasise the priority that I attach to the responsibility you and your boards have to ensure that your executive teams manage their budgets effectively and deliver the best value for money. This is particularly important when looking at the pay of your senior leadership teams”.


He added that the then chief executive of the Education Skills and Funding Agency had written to a number of single academy trusts where remuneration for a trust employee was over £150,000 and he would be writing to all MATs where this applied too. He added:

“I believe that not all boards are being rigorous enough on this issue. CEO and senior pay should reflect the improvements they make to schools’ performance and how efficiently they run their trusts. I would not expect the pay of a CEO or other non-teaching staff to increase faster than the pay award for teachers”.


In 2019, my noble friend Lord Agnew wrote again to the chairs of boards of trusts in a letter headed “Excessive High Pay to Employees”, requiring information from those trusts on the salaries and bonuses paid to individuals in those trusts earning more than £100,000. This might not happen too often, so it is perhaps a little noteworthy that I entirely agree with my noble friend. I entirely agree that the pay of CEOs and other non-teaching staff should not increase faster than the pay award for teachers. But my amendment is more conservative than that, with a small C. It would simply put the pay of MAT CEOs and single academy trust CEOs within the remit of the School Teachers’ Review Body, as is teacher and school leader pay.

I gave evidence to the STRB for over 20 years, both as general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the joint general secretary of the National Education Union. The process of giving evidence is rigorous. STRB witnesses are required to submit detailed written evidence to the board on the pay awards that they feel are necessary and just for teachers and leaders. The evidence takes into account the relative pay rises of other workers in the public and private sectors, the state of recruitment and retention in the teaching profession and a host of other wage economy evidence. The STRB then holds in-person oral sessions where witnesses are required to elaborate and build on their written submissions. The review body then considers all the evidence it has been given, including evidence from the Department for Education, and makes a recommendation to the Government which the Government must then decide whether or not to accept. All this amendment would do is put in place the same rigorous arrangements for CEOs of single and multi-academy trusts.

This is a necessary step because there has been an inflationary spiral in CEO pay. Schools Week, the trade newspaper, conducts an annual executive pay investigation, which this year included 1,800 trusts. What this analysis found was that the gap between the CEO and other staff in multi-academy trusts is widening the pay gap. Sixty-four CEOs earned more than £200,000 a year. Five multi-academy trusts registered increases of over 20% or more in CEO pay. Now these pay rises may be justified. The problem is that the taxpayer does not know the reasoning behind them and we do not have an agreed definition of what the job description of a CEO is. How is it different from a head teacher? What is the job weight and how is it weighed by the boards, by the governing bodies?

The danger in a lack of appropriate regulation of CEO pay was well articulated by Sam Henson, deputy CEO of the National Governance Association, who remarked that salary benchmarking for CEOs was

“in some cases, leading to inflationary spirals”.

He added that the benchmarking exercises

“don’t come with an accompanying narrative on how this deals with the massive pressures the sector is under, namely money being … in short supply, ongoing recruitment and retention challenges, and insufficient accountability”

for this role.

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[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 447A withdrawn.