Teachers have today backed a campaign for more scrutiny of academy trust finances, including the “excessive” salaries of senior staff.

The NASUWT teaching union’s annual conference today backed a motion which questioned how public money is spent by “some academy trusts...meant for the teaching and learning of children and young people, without regard for the needs of the schools or communities”.

Seconding the motion, union national executive member Harold Gurden said: “Excessive salaries are paid from public funding which should be spent on the education of children and young people.

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“The NASUWT believes that it is very clear there has been a refusal of successive secretary of states for education to regulate academy salaries by ensuring that the school teachers’ pay and conditions document covers the entire sector and all of the remuneration in it.”

He also repeated calls made the by union the last week for all academy trust leaders’ salaries to be on the public record.

He said: “It’s now high time for these stories of greed and excess to come to an end.”

The motion also highlighted spending by trusts on “programmes that are wasteful or of little value, and capital expenditure which does not support teaching and learning and is little more than vanity projects”.

National executive member Claire Ward gave the example of an academy trust in which four schools together paid more than £700,000 last year from their budgets in “top slicing” charges to cover “central costs” at the trust for services such as “governance and policy support” and “educational support and leadership”.

This included a secondary school that paid £403,000, but could have received the same package of service for around £40,000 from the local authority, she said.

Mover of the motion, NASUWT national treasurer Russ Walters, said: “We equally know there are some good academies with honest, hard-working leaders [but] we want to concentrate this motion on the slack financial control that allows those poor examples to flourish”.

The union will now continue its campaign for:

• improvements to the system of academy oversight so that academy finances are properly scrutinised in a locally accountable manner.
• all academy trust senior staff salaries and related party transactions to be included in publicly available data about every academy trust.
• the removal of flexibilities from academy trusts which enable the misuse of public funding.