Normally a waste of good trees, The Daily Mail has performed one of its rare services by exposing another scam in Britain’s vast and self-serving public sector. On the 11^th March 2025 (Academies Rich List: More than 750 academy bosses pocketed six-figure salaries last year), it reported at least 757 heads of multi-academy trusts to be getting £100,000 or more in total remuneration in 2022-23, amounting to a collective £118,463,335. At the top of the pyramid is Dan Moynihan, chief executive of the Harris Federation, who pocketed an impressive £565,000, of which £487,500 was salary and £77,500 pension contributions.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance, that reliable apologist for state-enabled grift—though only by the right people—has stepped in to tell us that this is all perfectly fine. “If the number of pupils getting a decent education is increasing, then the sums paid to the best academy chiefs are worth it,” says John O’Connell, chief executive of the Alliance. Dream on! Part of the job given to these trusts is not to educate children but to operate a taxpayer-funded money pump, channelling public funds straight into private pockets.

But, if that were the whole job, I’d not bother with a written commentary. The main job is to specialise in is the mass production of docility. These schools do not exist to cultivate intellectual curiosity or a love of learning. Instead, they churn out standardised, obedient functionaries—children trained not to question, but to comply. The point of these trusts is not to educate but to make ruling easier. The children of the elite still receive a proper education, filled with Latin and Greek and history, and exposure to ideas that matter. For everyone else, it’s training in how to accept without protest whatever absurdity the government or their future HR department demands.

Now, what of the Harris Federation, that shining beacon of excellence? The Mail reports: “Some 94 per cent of parents and governors opposed a takeover by Harris at one primary school.” When 94% of people involved in a school actively resist the takeover, one might assume that the intervention is unwelcome. But the Harris Federation does not operate on consent. Schools are handed over to academy trusts the way Soviet factories were handed over in the 1990s to insiders—through state decree, with no regard for public will.

Let us be clear: everything about the academy trust model is a scam. The salaries are unjustifiable. The supposed improvements are fraudulent, or worse than fraudulent so far as they tick the right boxes. Apart from its function to produce a generation of sheep, the system exists to convert taxpayer money into private wealth under the guise of educational reform.

The truth is, Britain is not some bastion of democratic competence and moral governance. It is a shabbier, colder, more bureaucratic version of any other corrupt state where officials rob the people in daylight. The academy trust racket is simply the educational wing of a broader national grift. Everyone in the public sector, from NHS managers to council executives, is on the take in one way or another. Britain is becoming Nigeria without the sunshine.

Above all, standards in education are not rising. The only standards raised are those ensuring the next generation is more passive, more ignorant, and more easily managed than the last. And for that service, the administrators are rewarded handsomely. The grift rolls on, and the taxpayer continues to foot the bill.