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Guidance for Executive Pay Setting in Academy Trusts

Empowering decisions, elevating leadership, meeting obligations

Having carved out a specialist practice, advising on executive pay setting for school trusts in the education sector, we’re well-equipped to support you and your trustees with executive pay setting processes to meet the obligations and expectations within the Academies Trust Handbook. 

Our approach 

At the core of our approach is our objective to help trusts do what is fundamentally right for their pupils and the organisation. 

Each project is different, as no two school trusts are the same. We take the time to understand the context of the trust, the level of challenge, the organisational structure and the distribution of leadership. We look at geography, the strategic plan, past growth, future planned growth and, of course, performance indicators. 

Working with so many different trusts has enabled us to develop our advice and methodology, building on our deep understanding of school trusts, our knowledge of the sector and, crucially, the regulator’s expectations. This means that our clients receive a service that delivers a best practice approach to executive pay setting.

Executive pay benchmarking in education

We have been working in partnership with Confederation of School Trusts (CST) and Brightmine (formerly known as Cendex) to build a salary survey for the school trusts sector since its launch in 2021. This school trust specific salary benchmarking tool provides useful data on salary expectations for executive roles which can be filtered by size of organisation (pupil numbers, number of schools, income) and by geographic location.  

Collaborating in support of the sector

Our commitment to the sector is entrenched in everything we do, utilising our experience and connections to unify our country’s approach to lifelong learning. 

We have worked with CST to generate a suite of guidance tools for their members on executive pay setting: 

Our methodology 

Being so immersed in the education sector enables us to add real value. We seek to share our knowledge and add value to our clients through a variety of means.

There are three stages to our methodology:

  1. Understanding the organisation
  2. Data gathering
  3. Analysis and recommendations

Our services

We’ll provide you with a variety of options tailored to your requirements, which could include the provision of basic benchmarking data (from across different sectors as well as education) right through to your reward strategy and everything in between.

Typically, we will carry out a salary benchmarking exercise for a client and then present our findings to the board or remuneration committee. We will also provide recommendations based on the benchmarking information in terms of reward methodologies for the executive team. Most clients also ask us to create an executive pay policy that contains a robust and compliant framework for trustees to follow annually.

Mark Lacey, Chief Executive, Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust
“The data provided through the benchmarking exercise was invaluable in enabling comparisons across the sector for different members of our executive team.  Even more valuable was the expert advice offered to the board that set this data in the specific context of our organisation, which gave us real confidence in our decision-making.”

Services

Utilising the Brightmine salary benchmarking tool to deliver salary data for multiple sectors (education, charities, public sector, private sector) refined by size of organisation (pupil numbers, number of schools, income) and geographic location.

We can provide recommendations for different ways to reward your executives that take into account the salary benchmarking data along with the contextual information about your organisation.

Our review will ensure that your executive job descriptions are not only accurate and up to date, but also reflect best practice in the sector.

We can provide you with a template contract for executive posts. The contract will come with guidance notes that will allow the Trust to tailor it for their use.

We can provide a template executive pay policy that complements your general staff pay policy. This is generally more suitable for those Trusts whose senior executive leaders are no longer on national terms.

Testimonials

Rachel Howie, CEO, Diocese of Gloucester Academies Trust
"The work was completed promptly and to a high standard. We will be using this service again.”
Rachel Howie, CEO, Diocese of Gloucester Academies Trust
“The Trust Board was extremely pleased with the executive pay benchmarking service completed by Browne Jacobson. The report was thorough and detailed and provided the information that was required to undertake a fair and transparent assessment of executive pay in the organisation."
Mark Lacey, Chief Executive, Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust
“The data provided through the benchmarking exercise was invaluable in enabling comparisons across the sector for different members of our executive team.  Even more valuable was the expert advice offered to the board that set this data in the specific context of our organisation, which gave us real confidence in our decision-making.”
Mark Lacey, Chief Executive, Diocese of Salisbury Academy Trust
“In fulfilling our responsibilities as a board, it was important to us to get the right advice in relation to executive pay.  Working with trusted partners at Browne Jacobson enabled us to achieve this."

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