I respect and admire my colleague William Stewart hugely. But on this one he’s wrong.

William seems to think that leaders in the schools sector can expect a level of professional or moral authority only if they sign up to a life of sackcloth and ashes.

Background: Academy fat cats’ 23% pay rise short-changes us all

Exclusive: Third of top-paying trusts awarded more pay rises last year

Revealed: The MATs that raised leaders’ pay despite DfE challenge

Apparently CEOs of large, complex organisations like multi-academy trusts (MATs) should accept the vast responsibilities placed on their shoulders without remuneration that reflects their work.

Of course there are examples of excessive pay in the system - I cannot defend Sir Dan Moynihan’s £500,000 per year at Harris, and the same goes for the heads of individual schools who clear £200,000 - but William consistently underestimates the scale of the job that CEOs of large MATs do. He seems to think they are little more than beancounters in charge of centralised admin.

It is a fact too often overlooked that in MATs, the buck stops with the CEO, not the individual heads. When a school joins a trust - forcibly or otherwise - it is subsumed into the wider legal entity. In many ways, the school ceases to be. The MAT trustees hold the CEO to account, in a way that a board of governors holds headteachers to account in local authority schools. (Indeed, some MATs have, for better or worse, severely diluted or even abolished local governing bodies, such is the degree of centralised power.)

In many MATs, the days of “top-slicing” are gone and budgets are often 100 per cent centralised. In all trusts, the CEO is the “accounting officer” and is responsible to the government (technically Parliament) for the organisation’s finances.

Furthermore, MATs now regularly take on many of the other responsibilities that used to reside with schools. From pedagogy to CPD to behaviour strategy to financial planning, decisions often reside in the centre. 

(One head told me recently - not without irony - that the only way she could maintain her school’s degree of autonomy was to stay part of the local authority.)

This new reality is now being recognised by the way the education system is reported. If a school in a MAT goes into special measures, it is seen as a failure of the trust, not the school. The media and the commentariat want to know what the MAT has to say, not the headteacher. Indeed, league tables of MAT academic performance are published every year.

When there is financial impropriety at a school that belongs to a trust, who does the Education Funding Agency turn to find out what has gone wrong? The MAT.

And so I would go further: the pay bracket that is so animating my esteemed colleague is not even that vast. For those running a big MAT, I would argue that £142,467 is not excessive - indeed it is less than the prime minister earns, which is generally seen as the benchmark of excessive public sector pay.

Yes, a 23 per cent average raise does sound eye-watering, but surely instead of comparing it in a puritanical way with the failure in recent years to give classroom teachers a proper rise, we should be calling for them to get a hike too?

Similarly, to say that MAT CEO pay should be suppressed because old-style local authority directors of education don’t receive the same levels of remuneration is to look at this the wrong way round. Surely, we should be calling for directors’ pay to match CEOs doing comparable jobs?

Some critics - including William - rail against how some justify the increases to MAT CEO pay by comparing their roles to those of business executives but in truth this whole conceit is flawed. Even Sir Dan’s salary pales into insignificance compared to CEOs of FTSE 250 companies, who on average earn nearly £2 million per year. 

Ultimately, the bosses of large MATs have taken on a multi-faceted and hugely complex job and with enormous levels of pressure relating to the education of many thousands of young people.

If they are successful, they deserve to be celebrated as extraordinary public servants, and one of way of doing so is to make sure they are well rewarded.