Head teachers from grammar schools could see their pay double to £200,000 a year in return for also taking over the management of failing schools in their area, under plans to bring private sector-style leadership and pay rates into state schools.

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, is asking the body that sets teachers’ pay to put forward a new system of “rewards and incentives” for 500 new “superheads”, including some currently at grammar and faith schools. The extra money would be used for pay rises, bonuses and consultancy fees to head teachers of top-ranking schools who agree to take on the management of one or more struggling local schools.

“I would like to see top rewards for the best head teachers so that they can deliver rising standards for all children and spread the benefits of their experience to other schools in their area,” Mr Balls told The Times.

Head teachers’ salaries in England and Wales are set on a national scale, which starts at £39,000 for the head of a small primary in the provinces and rises to £105,000 for the head of an inner-London comprehensive. The salary for the head of a medium-sized secondary school in England with about 1,000 pupils is normally between £65,000 and £75,000.

In exceptional cases, such as a struggling school with a difficult catchment area and a high proportion of pupils with special needs, a head’s pay may rise to £150,000. Currently 220 heads earn more than £100,000 a year.

Mr Balls said the School Teachers Pay Review Board (STRB) will now be given an extended remit to come up with a new upper pay scale for heads. John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), suggested that this could be as much as £180,000 to £200,000 at the very top end of the scale. Mr Balls said: “In the private sector, when you identify the best leadership, you put that leadership to work. We want to make sure the pay is there in schools in order that [heads] have got incentives.

“If you are head teacher of a school of 1,500 pupils, plus staff, that’s a huge responsibility. If you are excellent at doing that we want to, where possible and practical, reward you for taking on the extra responsibility of doing that in more than one school.”

He hoped that head teachers from successful grammar and faith schools and academies would do their bit to help struggling neighbours. At present 20 of the 120 heads in the National Leaders in Education (NLE) programme are faith schools, but there are none from grammar schools.

Grammar schools in particular had a role to play in helping neighbouring secondary modern schools, he said, either through management or sponsoring them to become academies.

He added that he would also be expanding the NLE programme, which provides successful schools with more cash so that their heads can help struggling rivals. The number of heads involved will be expanded from 120 to 500 and extra funding would be made available, he suggested.

“NLE heads say they need more long-term funding stability. If you are going to another school or allowing your senior staff to go into another school for more than one year, you need certainty of funding for more than one year to make that possible. I will look at that,” he said.

A pay packet of £180,000 to £200,000 would put state school heads ahead of the top-paid headmasters in the independent sector, who earn about £140,000 — although they can get substantial perks such as a house, a car or, sometimes, a gardener.

Most heads qualifying for the extra money would probably remain at their current school as a “superhead”, leaving a deputy in charge while they moved in to help build up a new senior management team at one or more nearby struggling schools.

Money to pay for these plans would come from £200 million set aside for the Department for Children, Schools and Families in the last Budget but which has not yet been allocated for any specific purpose.The plans are part of a drive to turn around the 638 schools that fall below the Government’s achievement threshold of 30 per cent of pupils gaining five or more GCSEs at grade A* to C, including English and maths. The Government has previously given warning that such schools would be taken over, turned into academies or closed if they did not hit the 30 per cent target by 2010.

Mr Balls added that every local authority had been given until June to come up with a solution for turning round struggling schools in their area.

Mr Balls also defended the Government’s new diploma for 14 to 19-year- olds, after warnings from the head of the Edexcel exam board that schools were ill-prepared for the introduction of the qualification in September and that supporting IT systems would not be in place on time.

He said that the Government had decided to phase in the diplomas slowly in order to minimise the risks and to make sure that schools could cope.

He also criticised a teachers’ pay strike by 200,000 members of the National Union of Teachers planned for next Thursday, saying that teachers’ pay had been decided independently by the STRB.

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