Jayne Dowle: These highly-paid headteachers must not be permitted to name their price

Well, according to new information, more than 1,000 heads could be earning more than £100,000 a year – despite the massive pressure on school budgets.

If it’s true, that means the number of six-figure earners has doubled since last year. And it means they are all on more than your MP, who pulls in a relatively modest £65,737 in comparison.

When someone in the public sector is earning, in some cases, even more than the Prime Minister, you would hope that this individual might be accountable.

I don’t need to remind you that we are paying these salaries through our taxes, and when these headteachers retire, we will also pay their extremely comfortable pensions. But at the moment, you have no way of finding out if your children’s head is in this salary bracket. Their names are kept secret.

In a time when pretty much every other high-earning public sector professional is required to reveal his or her salary in the name of transparency, it simply isn’t fair that heads should get off the hook.

No wonder, the teaching unions are calling for these super-high earners to be named and shamed. And, as parents, I think we should join the call.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that individuals should be hounded. We just want to know what we are getting for our money. And ideally, we want a system which doesn’t allow senior teachers to name their price.

Although it galls me to see what some public sector professionals earn for doing jobs which some of us might find difficult to describe as an occupation, I’m pragmatic.

When you get to a certain level in a demanding public sector profession such as teaching, you can, to some extent, call the shots. It is a tough job, and although it is easy to scoff at the long holidays and so on, not all of us could do it.

But this problem of allowing high pay in education to run away with itself goes beyond individual heads: it is endemic. And successive governments, terrified of a mass exodus of experienced professionals to the private sector, have failed to do anything about it.

Let’s be realistic. If you’re a headteacher and your friend, who is also a head, gets a new job at £120,000 a year, unless you’re a martyr or the beneficiary of a private income, you’re not going to settle for half that amount when you next move on, are you?

That said, let’s put this in context. I am sure that his job is as tough as the Prime Minister’s, but is it really justifiable to pay the head of one primary school £276,523 – more or less double what David Cameron earns?

Well, someone obviously thought so, because that’s what Mark Elms, head of Tidemill Primary School in Deptford, south-east London, reportedly earned in one year. His renumeration included “fees for helping other schools”, one of the reasons why the debate about headteachers’ pay has become so complex.

Politicians, keen to promote the culture of “super-heads”, are presiding over a system which removes headteachers from an easily-recognisable hierarchy. And with it goes any semblance of a structured senior pay scale.

For ambitious heads these days, it’s not enough to have a desk in one office. Off they go, turning into consultants, managing more than one school, transforming themselves into “executive heads”, and it is easy to see how they can demand extra fees for this, that and the other.

We shouldn’t put a damper on ambition and enterprise. But we should remember that it us, the public, who are paying for this.

The public sector isn’t a free market, yet, although you only have to look at the NHS to see that it’s heading that way.

Although some might not like being reminded, teachers are still public servants. So although high reward appears to be proliferating with no Minister brave enough to call a halt, it is not right for politicians to use “banker logic” on this profession – ie, if we don’t allow them to be paid what they demand, they will disappear somewhere else.

You can see where the fear comes from, especially now we have a growing number of privately-funded academies, all of whom can set their own salaries, and all of whom require experienced headteachers to run them.

So if you ask me, as a parent, what should be done, I would say this. Set a realistic cap on what headteachers can earn. Make it public and transparent. And redistribute the cash into giving new recruits into the profession the very best training that money can buy.

It’s what ambitious young teachers and our children deserve. It sounds as simple as ABC, doesn’t it? If only it was so straightforward.