LABOUR was urged to fix the schools funding crisis by getting rid of academy bosses earning more than £500,000 by Britain’s largest education union yesterday.

Delegates shouted “shame” as the highest earning multi-academy trust (MAT) chiefs were named and shamed at the National Education Union’s (NEU) annual conference.

Cheers sounded as Harris Federation CEO Sir Dan Moynihan, the first academy trust leader to cross the half-a-million mark, was told to “take his salary and go and live on a desert island.”

Conference moved to escalate its campaign to end the academisation of schools by writing to MPs calling for an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to create a legal route for academies to return to local authority control.

Under the government Bill, councils will be allowed to open schools again and the automatic academisation of failing maintained settings will be ended.

Academies would also be made to follow reformed national teacher pay scales and conditions.

Moving the motion on the first day of the conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, Birmingham delegate David Room said that “it’s the CEOs who get eye-watering pay increases” who are looking to water down the education Bill.

Reeling off a list of the highest earning MAT CEOs, he asked: “None of them teach — what on Earth do they do to deserve that money and all this at a time when child poverty is through the roof?

“We call on Starmer to do much more, to go much further, much faster.

“We want and demand... a way back for academies to come back into local authority control. 

“We demand that local authority services are back on the agenda.”

Seconding the motion, Haringey delegate Efe Kurtluoglu said that academisation is making the school experience “less joyful” for pupils.

“The data is clear: academies do not outperform local authority schools, what they do outperform them in is CEO salaries,” he said.

“Let’s stop pretending this is about raising standards; it’s about control. It’s about turning education into a marketplace.”

Lambeth delegate Ben Gresham told of how funding for his local authority school was slashed after being taken over by successive academy trusts.

“This has a huge impact on teachers, support staff, educators but particularly our students,” he said.

“I have no doubt they [MAT chiefs] want to protect their own interests and own salaries… no wonder we have a school retention and recruitment crisis when this has become the default for our profession.”

Hastings delegate James Ellis told of how some MATs take a shocking up to 25 per cent of a school’s budget for centralised running costs. 

NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede said: “Even on its own terms the great academies experiment has been a failure.

“The original aims of the programme included boosting autonomy and driving efficiency, but the opposite has resulted.

“Academies within MATs are now under more stifling control than ever, and an expensive academy bureaucracy has developed, with bosses at the top receiving eye-watering sums.

“This is a wildly inefficient system, and one that promotes empire building and competition between schools, rather than collaboration.

“The government has a historic opportunity to restore principles of fairness, inclusion and co-operation to our schools.

“This must involve ending the one-way street of academisation so that schools can return to the local authority.”

Referring to government claims that “efficiencies” would cover the costs of an unfunded 2.8 per cent teacher pay rise this September, he added: “The excesses of the academy sector are one area where efficiencies could be found, but the government must at the same time invest in our schools and rebuild genuine local oversight and support.”

Delegates will vote on preparing to ballot for strike action over the pay rise at the conference today.

Analysis released by the union, meanwhile, shows that during the last academic year, large MATs saw one in five teachers leave their jobs and more than one in nine teachers leave the teaching profession entirely.

The new data from a freedom of information request showed this is significantly higher than on local-authority maintained schools over the same period, where one in seven teachers left their jobs and one in 11 teachers left the teaching profession.