Hi Marianne

Never done this in particular connection with MAT senior central services staff, but I'd have thought the local area location would have a large influence - eg jobs in somewhere like Barnsley will tend to have very different salary levels to their equivalents in say Milton Keynes or Oxford areas.

Local Government / teaching staff though have national salary scales and it shouldn't be too difficult either roughly to compare / rank jobs with these before adjusting for geographical area then deciding whether you're going to pay at the norm / median level or above or below it.

Hi Marianne

If you use a graded pay scale, the rate would be determined by the job description after evaluation.

The problem I found by looking into this is not all MATs have a COO or FD etc so who do you benchmark them against? Also just because someone holds a particular job title doesn't mean their role covers the same accountabilities as you have. Central services is a new concept in schools so most are unique to the needs of the MAT and their split with what work is still retained within the schools.

I don't think you can benchmark outside the sector either as benefits such as pension contributions are extremely high compared to non-public sector, which counters some of the impact of the lower salaries.

So to benchmark our COO's salary, I went old-school and googled vacancies for a COO role and pulled together data from adverts by MATs in the last 2 years. I detailed the number of schools in the MAT, pupil numbers, their location (our MAT is based in the Fringe and outer-London areas so we have LW on top of our salaries), and what the current salary would be taking into account the national cost of living increases.

I hope this helps :)

In reply to Kimberly:

I would have thought it entirely valid to benchmark outside the sector - after of course making appropriate adjustments for eg level of employer pension contributions in order to compare like with like. A (specialist) managerial job role is a managerial job role wherever it's being done, so it shouldn't be too difficult to compare like for like levels of seniority / responsibility

In reply to Kimberly:

Hi Kimberly

Thanks for your reply and advice. I have started the old-school route but also faced the same problems you have mentioned so was looking for some inspiration but will carry on.

We still use the LA JE scheme and pay scales for support staff but looking at the salary at the top of the scale, I'm not anticipating that these roles would be covered.

Did you find that most examples came from TES and The Guardian?

Kind regards

Marianne

In reply to Marianne:

Hi Marianne,

Benchmarking simply on job title and using job adverts is a dangerous route for some of the reasons that Kimberly mentions .... if you are still looking for help then PiE (Pay in Education) is the perfect solution - an affordable, robust, online pay and allowance benchmarking tool specifically designed for the education sector - This was initially developed for benchmarking in single schools but we have recently been developing a framework to include the Central Service roles so would be happy to work with you on this - more info and contact details available at www.payineducation.co.uk