Hi

I work for a stand alone academy and have been tasked with the same thing. I know you didn't get any replies here but I wonder if you found a good way of getting this information as I am struggling!

In reply to Andrea Jennings:

Hi Andrea

Its really not easy. In the end I subscribed to some of the Xpert HR salary surveys but they don't have an education survey yet, although they are developing one. Wherabouts are you based? Are you in touch with the Local Government Association - they sometimes run networking events?

In reply to Karen:

Might be worth mentioning that, on behalf of a major employer in our area of the country, I was once part of a local consortium that regularly surveyed and collated data on salaries and benefits. The published data of course anonymised the organisations involved.

Generally it was a most useful and illuminating initiative, if in small part only serving to highlight the inherent limitations of statistical data collation and analysis.

Thus one answer to the problem, especially if the focus is not nationwide might be to organise a self help group of interested academies to do a similar thing.

Nationally, sure the main teachers trade unions such as the NUT and the ATL might help you with their experiences and impressions if you approach them in an appropriate way.

I do wonder if benchmarking or a salary survey is really appropriate here. (And I know that is heretical in HR circles)

I have had some dealings with MATs both at the smaller end (2-5 schools) and also at the much larger scale. My sense from that experience is that (By and large) there is no real market place for most of the support staff and that (again generally) they are not really moving around from Trust to Trust. Maybe in 5 years time as/if MATs mature they will do.

Generally they tend to be very locally hired, often from one of the Academies in the MAT and promoted into a wider role. There is often little or no external competition and its a case of working out what's "fair" in the circumstances and motivational of that person.

So whilst the idea of creating a bespoke salary survey or salary club is a good one - I am not sure if, after going to all that effort, you will actually find out anything particularly useful

I work for a growing MAT and we use the support staff pay scales and have all non-teaching jobs, including our central trust team, evaluated against this.

It's all detailed in our pay policy, which I believe is an EFSA requirement.

Tbh, our salaries are not competitive compared to commercial, however, the benefits (holidays, pension, training etc) are far better, and we are looking at our approach to recruitment as opposed to comparing/matching our salaries.

The school I work in is setting up a MAT so this is something I will need to research at some stage.

Hi Karen, I know you posted this some time ago but if you are still looking for help then PiE is the perfect solution - an affordable, robust, online pay and allowance benchmarking tool specifically designed for the education sector - more info available at www.payineducation.co.uk.

In terms of who you need to benchmark I would argue you do need to benchmark those on national pay scales as well because as more and more academies move away from using the national scales, the transparency of what is being paid by other academies is reducing - by benchmarking all roles you can clearly see whether choosing to stick with the national scales is impacting the competitiveness of your salaries and help you demonstrate how well placed they are with those being paid by other schools you are competing with when it comes to recruitment and retention of key talent.