Warwick Mansell

Last week Education Uncovered revealed that Mossbourne spent £400,000 on legal fees as it reacted to the instigation of the review. educationuncovered.co.uk/news/if-we-h...

The Hackney Citizen reported last week, too, of an “oversight board” having been set up following the safeguarding review, www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2026/02/25/c...

Another recent development has seen Sir Michael Wilshaw return to Mossbourne, this time as one of the academy trust’s controlling members, who have powers including over its constitution and the appointment and dismissal of trustees.

Departure of long-serving board chair Henry Colthurst came on Monday, with Companies House being notified yesterday.

New: Chair of board at under-pressure Mossbourne Federation stands down
educationuncovered.co.uk/news/chair-o...
Apparent signal of the first concrete impact of safeguarding review which had raised criticisms of a Mossbourne school’s behaviour management policies.

NPCAT has not responded to a request for comment.

There was also an error in the accounts in terms of their reporting of past pay, which I document here.

Although that is not an isolated phenomenon, in terms of MAT leadership versus LA director pay.

Top pay, both last year and the year before, at this trust were well in advance of that of the director of education at England’s largest local authority, Hampshire, despite the latter overseeing more than 10 times more pupils than does NPCAT.

So these accounts, as so often now seems the case re academies’ financial statements, necessitate a bit of detective work, in relation to what is the fourth-highest pay package I’ve seen so far in 24-25.

There’s some mystery about what might have driven the increase in pay from £215-£220k in 23-24 to £320-£330k last year, and even who received the latter package, because academy reporting requirements on top pay are lacking in transparency compared to what happens in local authorities.

New: Catholic multi-academy trust saw top-paid person’s pay jump by six figures last year, to more than £300,000
educationuncovered.co.uk/news/catholi...
Rise in remuneration for top-paid person at the 38-school Nicholas Postgate Catholic Academy Trust highest yet seen by this website in 2024-25.

Under-fire trust behind south Essex schools spent over £400k fighting damning review A TRUST under intense scrutiny spent more than £400,000 on legal fees in an attempt to challenge a damning safeguarding review, new documents reveal

Mossbourne Federation "could have spent [the money] on safeguarding improvements, SEND support and pastoral care," Thurrock councillor states. Follow-up by Essex local newspaper on my FOI which showed £400k legal fee spending: www.echo-news.co.uk/news/2590209...

Just spotted some more obvious errors in a set of accounts for another reasonably large multi-academy trust, which will feed into yet another story about high leadership remuneration. Am staggered that quality control processes are not better, given no of ppl meant to look at them.

...Yet the DfE now seeming to plough full speed ahead towards an all-academy system, without doing much about those weaknesses. As I may have already said, capitulation to those representing multi-academy trusts is strange.

"One of the weaknesses is the lack of local accountability...Decisions affecting our children shouldn’t be made by someone in Cambridge or London who isn’t seeing what’s happening on the ground”. Thurrock councillor criticises acads system re Mossbourne...

www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2026/02/25/c...

Two other academy trusts for which I can recall coming across 20 per cent-plus topslice figures have seen dramatic changes over the past year or so: one losing all its schools and the other seeing its entire leadership changed.

The NEU says the trusts needs urgently to “explain where the money has gone”. That seems a fair point.

This is not a trust, however, spending huge amounts on executives on six-figure salaries, as of course we see in many academy chains.

It’s also possible to see that some schools appear to have faced, this year, greater topslice charges than they had left in their budgets last year, once spending on teacher and ed support staff salaries were subtracted from their core government funding.

I’ve dug into DfE school-by-school spending data for 2023-24 to try to understand how much the schools were paying on services now said to be funded by head office, to see if it explains the £6.6m increase in topslice fees. Hard to see that it does.

But I cannot see any note explaining the change in the financial statements, which list the same central services being paid for, and same basis for calculation, across the two years, despite the huge change in amounts paid by its schools.

The trust told me that changes to the way it calculated its central charges meant that services previously paid for at the school level were now accounted for centrally, and that this had been explained in the accounts.

Individual amounts paid by schools, as reported in the accounts, rose hugely, with its secondary school seeing its topslice increase from £263k to £1.6m, and two primaries seeing nearly £1m each going to the central trust.

Similarly, the proportion of its schools’ General Annual Grant funding which it clawed back in central charges soared from 5.2 per cent to 25.1 per cent last year.

Extraordinarily, the topslice was hiked by a factor of more than five in 2024-25, Unicat’s accounts show, from a total of £1.5m in 2023-24 to £8.1m in 2024-25.

New: Multi-academy trust faces questions over its 25 per cent topslice
educationuncovered.co.uk/news/multi-a...
Central charges figure at 17-school University of Chichester (Multi) Academy Trust is one of highest I’ve seen.

Reflecting on this some more. The least the government should do, given we have this system, is try to mitigate its weaknesses, in terms of making it a more public-facing public service, and to regulate it properly. Instead, it has turned cheerleader for this flawed structural set-up. It's bizarre.

"We should not cave in to vested interests", says Labour. Sadly, it has just done that in education. New (open access) piece:

educationuncovered.co.uk/analysis/we-...

warwickmansell.substack.com/p/we-should-...

With Mossbourne yet to outline any detailed response to Sir Alan’s review, more than two months after his report was published, this story still seems to have a way to run.