THE South Bank Academy Trust is appointing Trevor Burton as executive head to lead two secondary schools, leading to a vacant headship at Millthorpe School (salary £70,000 plus).

The trust will also soon appoint a trust principal as head of the whole cluster of schools. The executive head and trust principal salaries will presumably be even higher.

The trust has therefore added two layers of expensive senior management to the structures in place before academy conversion.

In doing so it has also broken two of the “guarantees” that the school heads gave to parents and the community during the consultation process in May 2015: that there would be no executive head, and the heads would not receive pay rises.

Another key guarantee, that the trust would contain only three schools, had already been broken within a month of the trust’s establishment in April 2016.

Parents concerned about school funding cuts might well ask why so much money is being spent on senior management. Parents in those schools still contemplating a conversion to academy status would be well advised to look at this example of how those running academies operate, and how solid are their “guarantees”.

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