SNCT Job Sizing Explained: How Scotland Sets Leadership Pay

The idea, and why it is unusual

Here is a question that sounds simple and turns out not to be: how much should a Head of Department be paid?

England answers it locally. A school's relevant body decides, within the framework the STPCD sets, what TLR value attaches to which responsibility, writes that into a pay policy, and applies it. The result is that two functionally identical roles in two neighbouring schools can carry materially different payments, and neither school has done anything wrong. The discretion is the design.

Scotland answers it with a questionnaire. Every promoted post — Principal Teacher, Depute Headteacher, Head Teacher — is scored against the same national instrument, and the score is converted to a salary point through a published table that anyone can look up. The same post, scored the same way, produces the same salary in Inverness, Glasgow and Hawick. The absence of discretion is the design.

It is genuinely unusual. Job evaluation schemes of this kind are common in local government generally, but applying one to school leadership posts, nationally, with joint union and employer administration, and with an explicit prohibition on local alternatives, is not something the rest of the UK does. Job-Sizing was introduced in Scotland in the latter part of 2002 and the early part of 2003, as part of the post-McCrone settlement, and it has formed part of the SNCT terms and conditions ever since.

The guidance describes the purpose in a single sentence: "Job-Sizing is a means by which the salary for leadership roles in schools can be assessed in a fair and consistent manner." Two words in that sentence do the work. "Fair" means the score reflects the actual scope of the job. "Consistent" means it does so identically wherever the job happens to be.

"Job sizing is about responsibility, not workload"

That is the first line of the guidance document — not a sub-clause buried on page 30, but the opening sentence under the heading "WHAT IS JOB-SIZING?". Its prominence is not accidental, and understanding the distinction it draws is the difference between using the system well and being perpetually frustrated by it.

Workload is how much time and effort the job takes. Responsibility is what the postholder is formally accountable for. These correlate, but they are not the same thing, and job sizing measures only the second.

The practical consequences are stark, and they are worth stating plainly because teachers regularly discover them the hard way:

• Working longer hours does not increase your score. A PT who spends sixty hours a week on a post scoped for thirty-five is not job-sized higher than one who discharges the same remit efficiently. The remit is what is measured.
• A difficult school does not automatically score more than an easy one. Some contextual factors do feed in — the roll, the staffing, the deprivation indicator, transport and split sites — but 'this job is harder than it looks' is not itself a scoring category.
• Doing things beyond your remit earns nothing. The guidance requires that 'All responsibilities to be job sized must be contained within the remit of the post, and capable of being discharged within the contracted hours for the role.' Informal extra work that isn't in the remit is, for scoring purposes, invisible.
• Being good at the job does not score. There is no performance element anywhere in the questionnaire. It sizes the post, not the person in it.

The clearest illustration of the principle in action is the guidance's treatment of pastoral caseloads. It sets an expectation that an individual PT (Guidance) caseload will not exceed 200 pupils, and says that where it does, the roll should be referred back to the Headteacher or Education Manager to address — likely resulting in an additional PT post being created. The stated rationale is explicitly two-part: very large caseloads become unmanageable in terms of workload and time, and the Toolkit awards no additional points for a caseload above 200.

The same design logic appears in the rule that a post held on a job-share basis should include the combined class teaching commitment of both postholders. The post is one post. It is sized once. How many people it is divided between is irrelevant to its size.

"There must not be any local arrangements"

The second load-bearing sentence in the guidance, appearing just a few paragraphs after the first, is this:

"There must not be any local arrangements that are applied as an alternative to job-sizing. All leadership roles must be sized appropriately."

And a little earlier: "There should be no leadership (PT/DHT/HT) roles that are not job-sized regardless of local circumstances."

Those two statements close the loophole that would otherwise make the whole apparatus decorative. A national scoring system that councils could opt out of when it produced an inconvenient answer would be no system at all. What the guidance does is make the national instrument mandatory and exclusive: every leadership post is sized, and nothing else may be substituted for sizing.

What local bodies do decide is the administration. The SNCT expects each Local Negotiating Committee for Teachers to have an agreed policy on how job sizing is conducted locally, and LNCTs agree duties, job descriptions and the procedures to be followed when filling promoted posts. The guidance adds that "It should be the case that Roles and Responsibilities are broadly similar across all sectors." So there is local process, and local job description drafting — but the scoring instrument and the score-to-salary table are national and fixed.

The guidance also puts a compliance edge on this: "It is good practice for those involved in the Job-Sizing of a post to familiarise themselves with the content of this document and adhere to the guidance. Any deviation may be subject to challenge at a local or national level." Departure from the guidance is not merely poor practice — it is challengeable, at national level, which is a real remedy that an English middle leader unhappy with their TLR simply does not have.

Who does the scoring: the Job-Sizing Co-ordinators

A scoring system is only as trustworthy as the people operating it, and this is where the Scottish model makes its most distinctive choice. Scoring is not done by the headteacher, not by HR, and not by the council alone. It is done by Job-Sizing Co-ordinators, and the guidance sets out their constitution precisely.

Co-ordinators are also entitled to the evidence. The guidance lists what they will require access to when validating a questionnaire, including the completed questionnaire itself (explicitly "not a Toolkit outcome"), the last completed questionnaire for the post if available, staffing information, budget information, the school timetable for secondaries or the classification for primaries, the post remit, the School Improvement Plan and the School Calendar. That is a documentary basis for a pay decision, held by a joint body, that English middle leadership pay has no counterpart to.

The questionnaire, section by section

The instrument itself has five sections. Sections 2 to 5 capture the responsibilities of the specific post; Section 1 captures the school around it. Crucially, the guidance directs that Section 1 "must only be completed by the Job-Sizing Co-ordinators and ONLY AFTER the claim in sections 2 to 5 has been agreed" — the school data is applied after the post's own responsibilities have been settled, not before, so that the context cannot be used to shape the claim.

Section 1: Whole school information

Fourteen items, most of them factual and verifiable rather than matters of judgement. They include the type of post and type of establishment (including whether the school has an Early Education and Childcare unit or an Additional Support for Learning unit); the school roll, taken from the most recently published Scottish Government census data; the number of staff; a deprivation indicator; the size of the school budget; and what the guidance calls the physical nature of the school.

Several of these repay a closer look:

• Staff numbers are counted in three separate boxes — the total FTE of HT, DHT and PT postholders in the school; the FTE of all other teachers directly line managed within the school; and the FTE of all other staff who work in the school and are directly line managed within it. Teacher FTE is based on a 35-hour week. Only CORE staffing counts: the guidance defines CORE as the staffing entitled when the local authority formula or standard is applied, excluding staff funded from other streams such as temporary allocations.
• The deprivation indicator is now the School Clothing Grant, not Free School Meals. The 2026 revision changed this because universal Free School Meals had made FSM data useless as a measure of deprivation. Councils are to gather the Clothing Grant data annually and share it with the co-ordinators.
• The budget figure is narrower than you would expect. Salary and other employee costs are excluded, as are building maintenance costs unless devolved, capital expenditure, special funding from the Scottish Government or other sources such as Pupil Equity Funding or section 23 payments, and monies collected from parents. What counts is the budget for which the Headteacher is genuinely accountable, with reference to the Council's Devolved School Management document.
• Transport and split sites are counted separately. The questionnaire asks for the number of pupils for whom transport is provided and for which the school has health and safety responsibility — pupils using local bus services are excluded. It also asks whether the school has classrooms on more than one site, defined as where it is necessary to leave the school premises to move between locations, and only where the HT is responsible for more than one site. Sports or specialist facilities elsewhere do not make a school multi-site.

There is also a quiet piece of anti-gaming design in the roll question: "In any situation where a role is being re-sized, the school roll must be maintained for two national census data collections before consideration will be given as to whether the provisions of the re-sizing criteria have been met." One good year of recruitment does not move anybody's salary.

Section 2: Leadership, good management and strategic direction of colleagues

This section covers direct line management responsibility for teaching staff and for other staff, accountability for budgets, and responsibility for health and safety. Headteachers receive an automatic score here based on the whole school data, and complete only the health and safety question; DHT and PT posts complete all of it.

The guidance defines line management with unusual precision, because it is the section most open to inflated claims. An individual has line management responsibility "when they are formally designated to oversee and manage the performance and development of staff within a department, faculty, or unit", encompassing strategic oversight of improvement planning, staff development and performance through Professional Review and Development and Career-Long Professional Learning, operational management including absence, disciplinary and competence procedures, and quality assurance against school and Council standards. And then, decisively: "Responsibilities limited to classroom supervision, mentoring without formal accountability, or leading specific projects without overarching management duties do not constitute line management responsibility."

Shared management is handled pro rata, and the guidance states flatly that "Double counting of staff is not permitted." The same member of staff cannot generate score for two different postholders.

Section 3: Curriculum development and quality assurance

Five questions covering CLPL and performance review of colleagues (scored automatically from the line management figures in Section 2, so there is nothing to enter); production and implementation of the school improvement plan and responsibility for whole school policies; curriculum development and monitoring of learning and teaching; other formal management responsibilities; and timetabled teaching time.

The whole-school policy question gives a sense of the granularity involved. A claim can be made where the postholder has sole responsibility for producing, leading and reviewing certain whole school policies — the guidance lists examples including learning, teaching and assessment; reporting to parents and carers; homework; relationships, behaviour and bullying; curriculum including literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing; support for learning, ASN, inclusion and equality; and child protection and safeguarding.

The "other formal management responsibilities" question carries a strict exclusivity rule: for each responsibility listed, only one post in the school can receive credit for it. The single exception is Learning and Behaviour Support, where two posts may be credited — one for Learning Support and one for Behaviour Support. The guidance notes it is entirely possible that no boxes will be ticked in this section, particularly for PT posts, and gives a pointed example of what does not count: a claim for whole-school digital learning and innovation is valid where it involves developing strategies and upskilling teachers, but not where the responsibility amounts to purchasing ICT equipment, resetting passwords, being the school's GLOW or SEEMIS contact, or running the school's social media.

On teaching time, one detail is worth flagging for headteachers: "HTs should not make an entry here if the staffing standard of the school does not compel them to be class teachers but they choose to do some teaching." Voluntary teaching does not score.

Section 4: Whole school policy and implementation

Three questions, covering policy on pupil behaviour and respectful relationships; policy on guidance, pupil support, pastoral care and pupil welfare; and policy on pupil assessment. All promoted posts are awarded a base score for this area calculated from the whole school data; the questions themselves may be completed for DHT and PT posts only.

The behaviour question shows how carefully the guidance distinguishes between holding a policy and merely operating under it. It states that it is "a general responsibility for subject PTs to implement the school's disciplinary arrangements and behaviour/relationship policy at departmental/faculty level and, therefore, a claim for this cannot be made under 4.1 or 4.2." Enforcing the behaviour policy in your department is part of being a PT; owning the policy is a separate, scoreable responsibility.

Section 5: Working with partners

Three questions covering work with parents and carers; leading or working with colleagues in the same establishment; and working with other establishments and agencies. Again, all promoted posts receive a base score from whole school data, and the questions are completed only for DHT and PT posts.

The threshold here is deliberately high, because the baseline is already priced in. "All promoted postholders have a responsibility for working with parents/carers and, therefore, this box should only be ticked if there is an additional specific responsibility linked to the school improvement plan." Normal reporting and parental engagement sessions are not captured — they sit in the base score. Evidence is required, and the guidance suggests things like delivering UCAS information evenings or specific engagement sessions.

The inter-agency question sets a similar bar. Working with social work, third sector organisations, health or the Children's Reporter on a regular basis that requires time to be set aside within the week qualifies. "Attendance at one-off meetings or occasional email exchange / Teams meetings will not in themselves fulfil the requirement for a claim in this section."

From score to salary: the Annex B tables

Once the validated questionnaire has been entered into the Toolkit, it produces a number. That number is converted to a salary point using Part 2, Appendix 2.2, Annex B — Job Size Score Allocation to Salary Spines. There is no further step, no moderation panel, and no discretion. These are the tables.

Principal Teacher: eight points

Headteacher and Depute Headteacher: nineteen points

A few things stand out from the shape of these tables. Both start with an unusually wide first band — 83 points wide for PT, 129 for HT/DHT — because every post carries a base score reflecting the responsibilities typically assigned to the grade, and differentiation only begins above that floor. Both then narrow into tight bands of 14–19 points through the middle of the range, so that modest genuine differences in responsibility do produce different salaries. And the HT/DHT table widens again from point 11 upward, with bands of 25 and then nearly 40 points, before terminating in an open-ended top band: score 522 or more and you are on point 19, however much more.

That open top band is the one place the system stops differentiating. Beyond 522, additional responsibility earns nothing further. Scotland's largest and most complex headships are, in scoring terms, indistinguishable from one another.

How a post actually gets sized

Re-sizing: Type A, B and C changes

Because the score is fixed at the point of sizing and does not drift with service, the re-sizing rules matter enormously — they are the only route to a different salary point short of changing jobs. They live in Appendix 2.3 and its Annex A, the Review Criteria, also revised in April 2026.

Every question in the questionnaire has an associated change threshold, and each threshold is graded by how significant a change it represents:

The thresholds themselves are specific numbers rather than judgement calls. A sample:

Three procedural constraints sit on top of the thresholds, and all three are designed to keep the system stable rather than churning:

• Reviews happen twice a year, not on demand. At or around the end of the school session, implemented from 1 August, and in December, effective from 1 February.
• A post is normally reviewed only once in any twelve-month period.
• A change must have been part of the remit for two years or longer to be included in a re-sizing. Temporary arrangements, acting-up cover and one-off projects do not move the score.

On who can start the process, the guidance is even-handed: "Where a postholder believes a review appears appropriate they should initially discuss this with their headteacher or manager. Where the council believes there is a need for a review this should be discussed with the postholder." Either side can raise it, and the conversation is expected to happen before anything formal begins.

The 2026 revision also included a fairness provision worth noting, which we mentioned above in a different context. Because the deprivation indicator changed from Free School Meals to School Clothing Grant, and because a changed measure would otherwise mechanically alter scores for reasons having nothing to do with the job, the review criteria state that the change from Free School Meals data to School Clothing Grant data "cannot be used, at this time, to determine whether there has been a category B change for the purposes of re sizing a post." The same protection is applied to the 2026 revisions to the "other formal management responsibilities" question. The instrument was updated without anyone's salary moving as a side effect — which is the kind of detail that only appears in a system whose designers expect to be held to account for it.

The contrast with England, made explicit

It is worth setting the two systems beside each other deliberately, because the comparison is the most interesting thing about either of them.

The bottom two rows contain the real trade. Scotland buys consistency and transparency, and pays for it with rigidity: your point is your point until the post itself changes. England buys flexibility and the possibility of progression, and pays for it with variability that can be arbitrary — STPCD paragraph 9.2 requires "appropriate scope within the range to allow for pay progression over time", which Scotland's fixed point simply does not offer.

What the system gets right — and what it costs

It would be easy to write this page as an advertisement for the Scottish model, and that would be a disservice. The system has real strengths and real costs, and anyone weighing a move across the border should see both.

What it gets right

• Genuine comparability. A PT post in Aberdeenshire and one in Dumfries and Galloway were scored on the same instrument. You can compare them meaningfully. Nothing in England allows an equivalent comparison of two TLRs.
• Equal pay by construction. Because the post is scored rather than the person, the most common mechanisms by which pay gaps open up — differential negotiation, differential confidence in asking, differential treatment by individual managers — have very little purchase. The questionnaire even records the gender of the postholder, which makes the pattern auditable.
• Union presence at the point of decision. The co-ordinators are jointly appointed. This is a structurally different position from being consulted on a policy that someone else then applies.
• A documented evidence base. The list of documents co-ordinators must see is specified in national guidance. Pay decisions rest on records, not recollection.
• Protection against delay. A manager who simply will not sign cannot stall the process indefinitely.
• Resistance to gaming, in both directions. Two census collections before a roll change counts; two years before a remit change counts; no double counting of staff; no score for voluntary teaching; no additional score for caseloads over 200.

What it costs

• No progression within a grade. Your point is fixed on appointment. There is no equivalent of moving up within a range for sustained good performance.
• Workload genuinely is not paid for. The guidance says so on line one. If your post is under-resourced, the answer the system offers is a staffing conversation, not a pay one — which is principled, and cold comfort in the moment.
• Rigidity in unusual cases. The Toolkit is explicitly not designed for non-school-based roles, and novel or hybrid posts require reference to the National Co-Ordinators. A system built on standardisation handles the standard case beautifully and the unusual one slowly.
• Downward re-sizing is possible. The mechanism is symmetrical, and a genuinely and durably reduced post can be re-graded downward.
• The top band is open-ended. Above a score of 522, the largest and most complex Scottish headships are paid identically. Differentiation stops exactly where the jobs get hardest.
• It is administratively heavy. Trained co-ordinators, national retraining cycles, documentary validation, twice-yearly review windows and a 43-page guidance document are not free. This is a system that costs real time to run.

Practical advice if your post is being sized

If you hold, or are about to hold, a Scottish promoted post, a handful of things follow directly from how the system works.

• Read the guidance before you complete anything. It is publicly available, it is specific, and it answers most disputes before they start. Most rejected claims are rejected for reasons the guidance states plainly.
• Write the remit carefully, because the remit is the pay. Responsibilities that are not in the remit cannot be scored. If you genuinely own a whole-school policy, it should be written down as such.
• Distinguish owning a policy from operating under one. This is where claims most often fail. Implementing the behaviour policy in your department is not the same as being responsible for the behaviour policy.
• Check for double counting before you claim. Only one post can be credited with each responsibility in section 3.4, and staff FTE cannot be counted twice across two postholders.
• Gather evidence as you go. The School Improvement Plan and the School Calendar are the documents co-ordinators look at. If a responsibility matters, it helps if it appears in them.
• Don't self-score to build a case. The guidance advises against it, and a claim built backwards from a desired Toolkit output tends to be visible as such.
• Involve your union early. The co-ordinators include union representatives, so your union is already a party to the process rather than an outside complainant. That is an advantage worth using.
• Track the review windows. Reviews are implemented from 1 August or 1 February. A post normally cannot be reviewed more than once in twelve months, so timing matters.

Sources

• SNCT Handbook, Part 2, Appendix 2.2, Annex A — Job Sizing Guidance, revised 04/26 (SNCT Joint Secretaries, 43pp), the source of all quoted wording on this page including "Job sizing is about responsibility, not workload" and "There must not be any local arrangements that are applied as an alternative to job-sizing"
• SNCT Handbook, Part 2, Appendix 2.2, Annex B — Job Size Score Allocation to Salary Spines, for both score-to-point tables
• SNCT Handbook, Part 2, Appendix 2.3, Annex A — Review Criteria, revised 04/26, for the Type A/B/C change thresholds
• SNCT Handbook, Part 2, Appendix 2.3 — Job Sizing Review, for the definitions of change types, the review windows and the twelve-month and two-year rules
• SNCT Handbook, Part 2, Appendix 2.1 — Salaries, for the cash values of each spine point from 1 August 2026
• SNCT — Job Sizing, which hosts the current Job Sizing Toolkit and the linked appendices