The MAT CEO pay cap is a watershed moment - but it's risky

A responsible step for the public good or an interfering new form of bureaucracy?

That is the question being asked since the Department for Education’s surprise announcement of tighter controls on multi-academy trust executive pay.

But whatever people’s view, most concede the same underlying truth - a small number of outlier salaries, sitting uneasily against the requirement that pay be “proportionate and justifiable,” have become a divisive distraction that the system could and should have designed its way out of years ago.

It really didn’t have to be this way. A decade and a half ago, as trusts grew fast with little central steer, an executive pay benchmark got set that nobody actually designed.

Public confidence in MAT leaders’ pay

It has proved almost impossible to bring this back down since.

It may be a cliché to say it, but it still needs saying: we are talking about a minority, and a shrinking one, as a new generation of CEOs takes post under a more scaffolded system than the one their predecessors inherited.

But the scaffold was never the full picture. For years, guidance has said pay must be proportionate and justifiable, and nobody disputes the principle.

What’s been missing is a shared, practical framework for what it means in practice. Boards have been forced to interpret it independently, while a few excessively high rates have skewed a blunt benchmarking culture for everyone else.

The highest-paid MAT CEO now earns more than £500,000 a year, almost four times the average academy trust CEO salary, and around 17 times the starting salary of a newly qualified teacher.

That is the extreme peak, not the pattern, and entirely unrepresentative of trust leadership as a whole. But in a system run on the public purse, it is outliers like this, not the average, that set the level of public confidence.

Unfair as that is to the vast majority of boards and executives who are nowhere near this story in reality, at least by perception, they become permanently bound to it.

Public confidence depends not simply on whether pay can be technically defended by a board but on whether it remains recognisably rooted in the values of public service.

Over the past decade, MAT leadership has increasingly been judged through market metrics where competitive success trumps democratic answerability to the communities that trusts serve.

Once leadership legitimacy is measured that way, executive pay follows the same logic.

Strongly worded letters, or even a ministerial approval cap, won’t solve that alone. You fix it by building a framework that judges pay the way the public actually wants trusts to be judged.

A blunt mechanism

The DfE’s new £174,000 prior-approval threshold, and pay rises tied to teacher pay awards, is nevertheless something of a watershed moment in recognising a structural issue that’s drifted for too long.

But that’s not the same as solving it.

To be clear, this is not an argument that MAT CEOs are routinely overpaid. Leading a modern trust is one of the most demanding roles in the public sector, and boards need the flexibility to attract and keep exceptional leaders, rewarded properly for what they carry.

The issue was never the executive community as a whole - it’s a system flaw that left boards navigating sensitive decisions in isolation.

NGA broadly welcomes the government’s proactive stance, but the bluntness of the chosen mechanism carries its own risks.

What the sector actually needs is something more sophisticated: a banded framework, similar in principle to NHS senior manager pay, reflecting trust size, complexity and regional variation.

In a recent NGA survey of those who govern trusts, 67 per cent wanted guidance on suggested pay bands for executives, against just 10 per cent who did not. When you strip out the “don’t knows” in the survey, 87 per cent of those with a view backed the idea. Trustees are asking for a framework.

The immediate danger now sits in implementation. Further education’s own approvals process has, in places, suffered exactly this kind of bottleneck.

A lag on that scale, across a system of this size, would mean strong appointments collapsing before they’re made. Ministers need clear criteria and a properly resourced approval process from day one, supporting boards, not replacing their judgement.

Avoiding a battle

This must not become a proxy battle between government and trust leaders.

It’s about building a system where boards can look their teachers, parents and communities in the eye and justify what they’ve decided.

The government has taken a necessary first step.

The task now is turning it into a framework that earns trust from boards, from leaders and from the public it’s meant to serve

Sam Henson is deputy chief executive of the National Governance Association