Teaching Careers in Scotland: Promoted Posts, Job Sizing and Headship

Most of our career content — the TLR guides, the NPQ explainer, the pathway to headship, assistant and deputy headteacher pay — describes a system that exists in England and nowhere else. It is built on the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document, a statutory instrument whose territorial extent is England, and on structures the STPCD creates: Teaching and Learning Responsibility payments, the Upper Pay Range threshold, the leadership group pay range, the eight headteacher groups, and the National Professional Qualifications that have grown up alongside them.

None of that applies in Scotland. Teachers employed by Scottish local authorities work under the SNCT Handbook, negotiated by the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers — a genuine negotiating body bringing together the teaching unions, COSLA on behalf of the local authorities, and the Scottish Government, rather than an independent review body making recommendations to a Secretary of State.

The temptation, when writing about this, is to translate: to say that a Principal Teacher is "the Scottish equivalent of" a Head of Department, or that the DHT/HT spine is "basically" the leadership pay range. We have tried hard not to do that, because the translation is what causes the mistakes. The two systems have made a genuinely different structural choice about what is being paid for. England pays a person more for taking on a responsibility. Scotland grades a post and then fills it. Almost every other difference follows from that one.

The four guides

A legacy scheme you may still encounter

Five differences worth knowing before you read anything else

If you take nothing else from this section, these are the structural facts that most often catch people out — whether they are Scottish teachers reading English careers advice, or English teachers considering a move north.

1. There are no TLRs in Scotland, at all. No allowance exists that can be added to a classroom teacher's salary in exchange for an additional responsibility. Additional responsibility means a different, graded post.
2. There is no leadership pay range and no headteacher groups. Depute Headteachers and Head Teachers sit together on one 19-point spine, and a Depute of a large secondary can be paid above the Head of a small primary.
3. Promoted-post pay is scored, not decided. A national questionnaire produces a number, and a published table converts that number to a salary point. Local alternatives are expressly prohibited.
4. Promoted post holders do not progress through their spine. The point is fixed by the job-sizing score until the post is re-sized. There is no annual increment within a promoted grade.
5. A headship qualification is legally required. Since 1 August 2020, only those holding the Standard for Headship may be appointed to a permanent headship in a local authority or grant-aided school. England had the same rule from 2003 and revoked it in 2012.

Who these guides are for

They are written for three groups of readers, and each will want a different starting point.

Scottish teachers working out how their own career and pay actually work will find most value in the job sizing guide, which explains the mechanism that will determine your salary the moment you take a promoted post — including how to make a claim well, what the guidance excludes, and how re-sizing is triggered. If you are earlier in your career, start with the probationer year guide.

English or Welsh teachers considering a move north should start with the Principal Teacher guide, which sets out the fundamental structural difference, and then read whichever of the headship or probationer guides matches their own stage. Each guide includes a section on what actually happens when you cross the border in either direction — including the pension transfer deadline, which is the most expensive thing to get wrong.

Anyone comparing the two systems — for a piece of research, a policy argument, or simple curiosity — will probably find the job sizing guide and the headship guide the most interesting, since they contain the two sharpest contrasts: a rigorous, transparent, jointly administered pay-setting mechanism on one side of the border and a largely discretionary one on the other, and two nations that passed each other going in opposite directions on whether headship should require a qualification.

Throughout, we have tried to be honest about what is verified and what is not. Every figure on these pages is sourced to the SNCT Handbook, GTC Scotland, Education Scotland, legislation.gov.uk or a Scottish Government publication, and each guide carries a sources list. Where we have drawn an inference rather than cited a fact — such as the suggestion that the frozen preference waiver payment explains its falling uptake — we say so explicitly rather than presenting it as established.