Latest news with #HarrisFederation
Evening Standard
07-07-2025
- Business
- Evening Standard
Teachers strike after Jamaican staff 'targeted' at south London school
A spokesperson for the Harris Federation said: 'In common with almost every other school in London, we are restructuring our team to be able to afford the unfunded National Insurance increases and national pay awards that the NEU campaigned for and the government has introduced. Likewise, in common with most other academy trusts, the NEU is looking to disrupt the very strong working relationship we have with our loyal, dedicated and hard working staff.
Time Out
25-06-2025
- General
- Time Out
Five London schools have been named the best in Britain
Children spend a lot of their lives at school. That's where they learn, it's probably where their friends are, and it's where they're being set up with skills and knowledge that'll benefit them for the rest of their lives. So, where your children go to school is pretty important. It can be tricky sometimes knowing where the best schools are, but some of them stand out as so great that they actually win awards. That's what Tes is all about. The annual Tes awards, which have been going for 17 years, seek to '[highlight] the outstanding efforts and achievements in state and independent schools', with a focus on 'bringing independent and state schools together to celebrate excellence across the whole education sector in one inclusive national event.' The 2025 awards took place last Friday (June 20), and winners were named in several categories from big ones like 'Inclusive School of the Year' to individual awards such as 'Teaching Assistant of the Year'. It gets pretty competitive, but five London schools managed to come out on top at the ceremony. The biggest win went to Oasis Academy South Bank, which was named Secondary School of the Year. The school was praised for its high teacher-retention, overwhelmingly positive outcomes for students, and for fostering an atmosphere that is 'calm, focused and filled with love'. Tes described the academy, which is free to attend, as providing 'pupils a warm, inclusive and supportive learning community that sets them up for life', adding that 'attendance is the second highest in the borough, despite the challenging circumstances of many pupils'. Pretty impressive stuff. Rosemead Preparatory School and Nursery was named independent prep school of the year, with judges impressed by its forward thinking approach to education such as 'AI-enhanced learning and assessment, robotics on the curriculum' and more. Based in Dulwich, one expert described this school as 'one to watch'. Other wins included Trust of the Year (10 schools or more) for the Harris Federation, for its high attainment levels and Ofsted reports, Best Use of Technology for the special needs school Abingdon House, which uses specialised tech to help its neurodiverse student body thrive, and Subject Lead of the Year, which went to William McWhirter, the head of PE at Kingsdale Foundation School. Each of these wins was well-earned, and you can see the complete judges comments on the Tes website here. Congrats – and thanks! – to all the schools and teachers keeping London's children well-educated and well-looked after. Get schooled with Time Out We've reported on a lot of school-related news. Here are the best private prep schools near London, and the best for getting students Oxbridge offers. Plus, this is the London university that is officially better than Oxford and Cambridge for 2026. Private schools aren't the only ones serving exceptional education, though. See which comprehensive state schools ranked highly on the Sunday Times Power Guide here, and the best selective and grammar schools, according to the same guide. If you want to check out other league tables, these are the UK's best state secondary schools based on 2024 GCSE results, according to Which School Advisor.
Times
26-05-2025
- Business
- Times
Britain's best-paid academy chief defends his £500k salary
Britain's highest paid academy trust head has said he is worth his £500,000 salary because he raises millions of pounds each year. Sir Dan Moynihan has claimed new funding from the government will cover less than half of next year's teacher pay rise, leaving schools to meet the rest. The chief executive of Harris Federation, which has 55 schools, is making dozens of teachers redundant partly because the pay increase is not fully funded by the government. The Department for Education said last week that schools would only have to fund approximately 1 per cent of the 4 per cent rise, from productivity gains and smarter spending. However it has now emerged that schools will be expected to pay for an additional 1.3 per cent from existing 'headroom' within money previously pledged from the government. Its new funding of £615 million amounts to only 1.7 per cent. Moynihan said: 'Schools will have to find another 2.3 per cent, not another 1 per cent. There is no 'headroom'. Non teaching staff costs and building maintenance are rising between 4 and 15 per cent for us because of other organisations passing on the increase in employers' national insurance contributions. 'Yet our grant [received from government] has gone up by only 0.5 per cent. Bridget Phillipson believes schools can make efficiencies but it's incorrect to think that can happen without affecting the quality of education.' Across Harris Federation, a 2.3 per cent increase in teacher salaries equates to about £7 million, and national insurance rises will cost another £1.5 million. The government has said it will fund the latter but this is calculated per pupil not per staff member. Moynihan's salary of about £515,000 has enraged teaching unions, who said any efficiencies should come from capping academy trust chief executive pay. However he told The Times that annually, he brings in several times that, by wooing philanthropists and other big donors. 'I lead fundraising and it raises £3.5 to 4.5 million a year. That's seven to nine times my salary. Every penny goes into the schools. I approach charitable organisations, do philanthropy, speak to people who are interested in supporting schools and tackling disadvantage,' he said. 'Two thirds of the schools we took over were in special measures when they joined us. Now 70 per cent are outstanding, compared with 17 per cent nationally.' Harris Federation is making 45 teachers redundant, mainly in inner London schools where pupil numbers are falling. Half have been achieved through redeployments but others face job losses, some in core subject areas like maths or science. Moynihan said people came into teaching as a vocation and wanted to make a difference to children's lives, and that it was 'incongruous' to make redundancies with the background of teacher shortages, but that the trust was already subsidising the deficit in schools from its reserves. • Another academy chief executive said trusts and local authorities were hoarding billions of pounds in reserves, which could be used to fund pay rises. Tom Campbell, chief executive of E-ACT trust which has 38 academies, said it was using solar panels to save money. The trust employs 3,500 people. Campbell said: 'This 4 per cent pay award is a welcome and meaningful step forward — especially given the fiscal context in which it was secured. It's a sign that, finally, the profession is being heard and that this government is serious about beginning to rebuild trust with teachers. 'The additional £615 million of funding that accompanies it is not insignificant, and while it doesn't erase years of underinvestment, it shows a clear shift in tone and direction from the Department for Education. 'The 1 per cent that will need to be funded by schools and trusts amounts to £1.1 million across our 38 schools. Broken down, that is less than £29,000 per school, which starts to look a little more manageable — though not for everyone, particularly smaller standalone schools. 'We will be able to save more than this per school on energy following our investment in solar — something that is available to all schools right now through the government's GB Energy scheme.' He added: 'Let's also not forget that there is also circa £6 billion of reserves sitting across the system in local authority schools and academy trusts. This is a significant amount of money that is very much front of mind for the civil servants in the Treasury when it comes to negotiating extra funding for schools. Our teachers and support staff are worth investing this in.' A Department for Education spokeswoman said: 'These claims are wrong. Schools are not expected to find 2.3 per cent to fund the pay rise. 'This year's pay award is backed by a significant investment of £615 million on top of billions already provided to schools to cover three quarters of the pay rise. The rest will be made up through improved productivity and smarter spending.'
Times
17-05-2025
- Business
- Times
Maths teachers laid off as schools face pay and tax rises
Since Sir Dan Moynihan joined the Harris Federation in 2007, he has never had to oversee redundancies across several of his schools. But the chief executive of the successful chain of 55 schools is consulting on 23 job cuts, including maths and science teachers. Like many education bosses, he blames the government's rise in employer's national insurance in April and a proposed 'unfunded' pay rise for teachers in the next academic year. 'Unfunded' means schools have to find the money from their existing budget. Moynihan said: 'We've been operating since 2007 and this is the first time we've had redundancies at multiple schools at the same time. This has been very distressing for people. It's people's livelihood and it's also their vocation. Nobody
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'They wanted $4m': Lessons for M&S from other cyber attacks
As Marks & Spencer (M&S) - and its customers - continue to reel from a major cyber attack, other people who have gone through similar experiences have been sharing what it is like to be targeted by hackers. "It was an absolute nightmare", says Sir Dan Moynihan. He is the Senior Executive Principal and Chief Executive of the Harris Federation, a group of 55 schools in the London and Essex area. It was hacked in 2021 - Sir Dan told the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4, that the culprits were the Russian ransomware crime group REvil. "Their purpose was to blackmail us into paying four million dollars in cryptocurrency within ten days," he said. "If we didn't pay in ten days, they wanted eight million." The hack caused chaos. Sir Dan said the group lost teaching materials, lesson plans and registration systems. More importantly, they also lost medical records and even the fire and phone systems were affected. The finances of the school group were hit. Staff, and bills, were left unpaid. M&S has also been targeted with ransomware - malicious software which locks an owner out of their computer or network and scrambles their data. The criminals then demand a fee to unlock it. Sir Dan says it was a demand he resisted. Instead, the school group approached a firm of cyber specialists who employed a hostage negotiator. That individual then took on the role of an inexperienced school bursar - an administrator - who pretended to not know what was going on. They took up negotiations with the hackers, with the purpose of delaying them for as long as possible so the school group could rebuild its systems. "The Russians had stolen data from us - they didn't tell us what - and they threatened to put this stuff up on the dark web and cause us great embarrassment, and secondly they would lock down our systems." Sir Dan said it took the Harris Federation three months to get everything working again, at the cost of £750,000. Among the work was 30,000 devices that needed to be "cleaned" following the hack. Was there ever a question of giving the criminals what they wanted? Never, said the school group boss. "The money we have is for disadvantaged young people, and secondly had we paid we would have opened the door for other school groups to be attacked." It is not known whether similar scenes are playing out behind the scenes at M&S, as the company has only issued limited information in its official statements, and has not put anyone up for interview. But people claiming to work for the retailer have given a sense of the chaos on social media. On Reddit, users who identified themselves as M&S workers, something the BBC has not verified, described the impact of the cyber attack. One wrote that most internal systems had been affected and that there had been experiments with "resuming operations manually with paper and pen". Another poster said head office staff were working weekends, and that the problems were "like going back in time". While some reported shortfalls in goods coming in, others described oversupply of some items, which meant food went to waste - with one saying they had to pour away multiple pints of milk. What is clear is other companies are watching what's happening closely, even more so since another retailer, the Co-op, shut down some of its IT systems this week in response to a separate cyber attack. "We're patching like mad," is what one retailer told the BBC. In other words, they are making sure every part of system has the most up-to-date software and protections. Sir Charlie Mayfield, the former chairman of John Lewis, said other firms understood only too well how vulnerable they were. "Online shopping has completely transformed retail - as technology becomes more pervasive, the risk of this kind of attack rises with it," he told the BBC. According to the cyber security breaches survey, conducted by the UK government, 74% of large businesses said they were targeted with cyber attacks last year. The experience of being hacked can be a difficult one for individuals caught in the disruption. Wedding dress designer Catherine Deane said it was "devastating" when her company's Instagram account was hacked. "It felt like the rug had been pulled from under us. Instagram is our primary social platform, and we've invested the most amount of time and business resources into it. "To keep the account current we post content every day. Suddenly all this work… it was just pulled." She told the BBC last month of the difficulty of fixing the problem with Meta, the owner of Instagram, describing that expereince as "almost traumatising". In June last year, staff at hospitals in London told of how they were left grappling with the aftermath of a cyber attack that led to many hours of extra work for their staff. A critical incident was declared after the ransomware attack targeted the services provided by pathology firm Synnovis. Services including blood transfusions were severely disrupted at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital and King's College Hospital (KCH). Dr Anneliese Rigby, a consultant anaesthetist at KCH, told the BBC: "So what the labs are having to do is receive the blood sample, manually process that, which is a long, time-consuming process requiring a lot of staff which we don't have so we're having to get extra people to help with that." It seems likely there will still be many difficult days ahead of M&S. Additional reporting by Zoe Kleinman, Chris Vallance, Joe Tidy and Tom Gerken 'I felt so violated when my Depop was hacked' 'My Instagram got hacked and I lost my business' Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the world's top tech stories and trends. Outside the UK? Sign up here.
