SNCT Sick Pay in Scotland: The Calendar-Day Scale Explained

There is no Burgundy Book in Scotland. That sentence is worth stating plainly at the outset because a very large proportion of what is written online about "teacher sick pay" silently assumes the English position, and a Scottish teacher who plans around it will get the timing, the arithmetic and the qualifying conditions wrong in three separate ways. Scotland's teachers work under the SNCT Handbook of Conditions of Service, negotiated by the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers — a tripartite body of the Scottish Government, COSLA representing the 32 councils, and the teaching unions led by the EIS and SSTA. Sickness allowance occupies Part 2, Section 6, formally titled "Sickness Allowances and Notification Arrangements".

The difference between the two systems is not a matter of Scotland being more or less generous. It is that the two documents are built on different foundations. England's scheme counts working days within directed time and resets on a fixed annual date. Scotland's counts calendar days at a daily rate of 1/365th of salary and looks backwards over a rolling twelve months. Almost every practical question a teacher asks — when does my full pay run out, does the summer holiday count, what happens if I am off again next term — gets a different answer in the two jurisdictions, and the answers diverge because of that structural difference rather than because of the headline numbers.

This page works through Section 6 in the order the document does, marks the paragraph numbers so you can check each point against the source, and sets the Scottish provisions explicitly against the English ones covered on our Burgundy Book sick pay guide. Where we could not verify something to our own satisfaction, the last section says so.

The scale, in full

Paragraph 6.6 sets out the entitlement to sickness allowance in any one period of twelve months, graduated by length of continuous qualifying council service:

Three features of that table repay a second look. The first is the asymmetry in the top band: 183 days at full salary and 182 at half. That is not a typographical error and it is not arbitrary. The two figures together come to 365, which is precisely one year of calendar days — the scheme is built so that a teacher with five years' service has, at maximum, exactly twelve months of graduated cover. The arithmetic only works because the count is in calendar days. No working-day scheme could produce a figure like 183 and 182; the numbers are a direct fingerprint of the calendar-day approach.

The second is the shape of the progression. The bands roughly double at each of the first two steps — 31 to 61 to 122 — then slow down, adding only 30 days between the three-year and five-year marks before jumping again at five years. England's scale rises in even increments of 25 working days per year of service and tops out at the fourth year. Scotland takes an extra year to reach its ceiling but arrives at a substantially larger one.

The third is the nil band. A teacher with less than 18 weeks of continuous qualifying council service has no occupational sickness allowance whatsoever. There is no equivalent in the Burgundy Book, which gives an English teacher 25 working days at full pay from the first day of service and gates only the half-pay element behind four calendar months. This is the one respect in which the Scottish scheme is unambiguously less protective, and it falls hardest on probationers and new entrants, who are covered in the section below.

Why "calendar days" changes everything

This is the spine of the whole page, and it is worth being slow about it, because the consequences run in directions that are not obvious.

Paragraph 6.12 provides that sickness allowance shall be calculated on the basis of 1/365th of the annual rate of salary for each calendar day the employee is certified absent. Read that literally. The unit of account is the calendar day, and the trigger is medical certification of absence, not the fact of missing a day you would otherwise have taught. Once a certified absence begins, every day inside it counts: Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays, in-service days, and the whole of the summer, October, Christmas and Easter closures if the absence spans them.

Contrast the English mechanism. Burgundy Book paragraph 2.3 defines "working days" for the purposes of the English scale as teaching and non-teaching days within directed time as specified in the STPCD — which for a full-time English classroom teacher is a maximum of 195 days across the year. And Burgundy Book paragraph 7.1 goes further, expressly providing that sickness during closure periods does not affect the period of a teacher's entitlement to sick leave at all. An English teacher signed off from the start of June who is still absent in September has spent perhaps twenty-odd working days of entitlement over that stretch; a Scottish teacher in the identical medical situation has spent around ninety calendar days.

There is a mirror-image effect that runs the other way and is rarely mentioned. Because the Scottish count is calendar-based, a short absence is cheap in a way it is not in England. A teacher off for a Thursday and Friday who returns on Monday has, under a working-days scheme, spent two days of entitlement. Under a calendar-day scheme, if the certified absence runs Thursday to Sunday inclusive the count is four — but if certification ends on the Friday it is two. The certification period, not the school week, determines the arithmetic, which is one reason the certification rules in paragraph 6.29 and 6.30 matter more in Scotland than their English equivalents.

The deeper point is that the two schemes are optimised for different risks. A working-days scheme protects heavily against long absences that straddle holidays, because the holidays are free. A calendar-day scheme protects against a straightforward run of illness measured in months, and it does so with a much larger headline number to compensate for the fact that the meter runs continuously. Neither is simply better. They are different insurance products.

The 1/365th calculation, and how SSP sits inside it

Because the entitlement is expressed in calendar days, the payment has to be expressed as a daily rate, and paragraph 6.12 supplies it: one three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth of the annual rate of salary, per certified calendar day. A teacher on £50,000 therefore accrues sickness allowance at roughly £136.99 per calendar day of full-salary entitlement, and half that on the half-salary tranche.

The same paragraph then deals with Statutory Sick Pay, and the drafting is more precise than England's. Where an employee is entitled to SSP, the full sickness allowance comprises a sum which, when added to the SSP payable, will equal 1/365th of the annual rate of salary for each certified calendar day. SSP is therefore the base layer and the council tops up to the daily rate. You do not receive SSP plus your allowance; you receive a combined figure that equals your allowance.

This is the same substantive principle as Burgundy Book paragraph 3.1 in England, which provides that sick pay shall include, where appropriate, SSP, and shall not exceed full ordinary pay. The difference is presentational but useful: England states a ceiling, Scotland states an equation. If you are trying to reconcile a Scottish payslip, the equation is the thing to work with.

SSP itself changed materially across the UK on 6 April 2026, when sections 10 and 11 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 were commenced by SI 2026/373. The three unpaid waiting days were abolished, so SSP is payable from the first qualifying day, and the Lower Earnings Limit qualifying threshold was removed, so low-hours employees who were previously excluded now qualify. The rate is the lower of £123.25 a week or 80% of normal weekly earnings. These are reserved employment-law matters and apply in Scotland exactly as they do in England, which means the reform is most valuable to precisely the Scottish teachers the SNCT scheme leaves uncovered — those below the 18-week threshold, and short-term supply staff.

A rolling 12 months, not a fixed year

The second structural divergence from England is about time rather than units, and it is the one most likely to produce a genuinely unwelcome surprise.

England runs a fixed sick leave year. Burgundy Book paragraph 4.1 deems a year to begin on 1 April and end on 31 March, and an English teacher can therefore point at a date on a calendar and say "my entitlement resets then". Scotland has no such date. Paragraph 6.6 frames the entitlement as arising "in any one period of 12 months", and paragraph 6.9 supplies the mechanism: all other sickness absences in the 12 months preceding the first day of absence will be taken into account and deducted from the sickness allowance entitlement.

That is a rolling look-back. Each time a fresh absence begins, the council looks back over the preceding twelve months, totals what was used, and deducts it. The consequences are worth spelling out:

• There is no reset date to wait for. A Scottish teacher who has used a large part of their entitlement cannot look forward to 1 April and a clean slate. Entitlement returns gradually, as individual past absences age past the twelve-month mark and drop out of the look-back window.
• The date an absence starts is what sets the window. Paragraph 6.9 measures the twelve months preceding the first day of the absence in question, so a long absence is assessed against the position at its outset rather than being continuously recalculated.
• Frequent short absences are handled more harshly than in England. A pattern of separate short absences across eighteen months can leave a Scottish teacher with materially reduced cover at the point they need it, where an English teacher spanning two sick leave years would have had a full reset in between.
• Conversely, a single bad year does not permanently follow you. Twelve months after a long absence ends, it has entirely left the window.

If you are approaching the end of full salary, the number to ask payroll for in Scotland is not "how many days do I have left this year" but "how many days have I used in the twelve months before this absence began, and on what dates". Those dates determine when entitlement comes back.

The 18-week gate, and what counts as a qualifying week

Paragraph 6.1 requires an employee to accrue a total of 18 weeks' continuous qualifying council service before any entitlement to sickness allowance arises. Until that point the scale shows nil and nil, and SSP is the only cover.

The definition of a qualifying week is, however, unusually generous, and it substantially softens the threshold for two groups who are often disadvantaged by service tests. A qualifying week includes any week in which the employee worked, regardless of the number of hours, and periods of leave are included. A teacher working two days a week accrues qualifying weeks at exactly the same rate as a full-time colleague. Eighteen weeks is eighteen weeks of the calendar, not eighteen weeks of full-time-equivalent work.

Continuity is broken only where a break in service exceeds two weeks. Once the 18 weeks has been attained, entitlement persists unless a subsequent break exceeds that two-week limit. There is also a re-entitlement provision: previous service counts towards re-establishing entitlement following maternity or adoption leave where the break does not exceed eight years, which is a materially longer grace period than most occupational schemes offer and is plainly designed with career-interrupted teachers in mind.

The two-week rule is the one to watch when changing councils. A teacher who finishes at one authority at the end of June and starts at another in mid-August has a gap well in excess of two weeks on the face of it, and how the intervening period is treated is a question to settle in writing with the incoming council before resigning. Because the scheme keys off qualifying council service with any Scottish council rather than service with your current employer, the intention is plainly portability; but the mechanics of a summer gap are exactly the kind of thing that gets recorded wrongly in a payroll system, and the time to correct it is while you are well.

Head-to-head: SNCT Section 6 against the Burgundy Book

Putting the two schemes side by side is useful provided the comparison is made at the level of structure rather than at the level of numbers. The table below sets out the differences that actually change outcomes.

The comparison that should not be made is the one you will see most often: "Scottish teachers get 183 days and English teachers get 100, so Scotland is nearly twice as good." That statement divides two numbers measured in different units. A more defensible summary is that an established Scottish teacher has up to a full calendar year of graduated cover for a continuous absence, while an established English teacher has an allowance that, because holidays are excluded, typically stretches across a longer elapsed period than its raw size suggests. Which is worth more depends entirely on the shape of the absence.

Assault at work: reclassified, not merely ring-fenced

Paragraph 6.23 is the provision most worth knowing and, in our reading, drafted more cleanly than its English counterpart. Where absence arises from an assault sustained in the course of employment, the period of absence shall not be treated as sickness absence. It is instead treated as special leave, attracting up to six months at full pay and six months at half pay on appropriate certification of fitness.

Notice how the protection is achieved. England's Burgundy Book grants the enhanced entitlement in paragraph 9.1 and then has to add a separate provision, paragraph 9.3, saying that such absence "shall not be reckoned against the teacher's entitlements under paragraph 2". The absence is still characterised as sickness absence; it is simply excluded from the count by a second rule. Scotland's drafting removes it from the category altogether. The absence is never sickness absence, so no exclusion rule is needed and there is nothing for a payroll system to get wrong by omission.

The substantive difference between the two is the half-pay tranche. England's paragraph 9.1 provides full pay for a period not exceeding six calendar months, after which paragraph 9.2 requires the question of an extension to be considered and, absent an extension, the teacher falls back onto the ordinary scale — which is intact, thanks to 9.3. Scotland's 6.23 builds the second six months in as an entitlement at half pay rather than leaving it to a discretionary extension. For a teacher facing a long recovery from a serious assault, that is a meaningful difference in certainty rather than merely in amount.

Injury at work: a separate allowance running in parallel

Distinct from assault, paragraph 6.20 deals with absence arising from injury sustained in the course of employment. It provides for a separate allowance, calculated on the same basis as ordinary sickness allowance, but operating independently of the Section 6.6 entitlement.

The architecture here is a second account rather than an exemption. A teacher who slips on an unsalted path in January and is absent for two months draws on the injury allowance; the days do not come out of the ordinary scale. If the same teacher then has an unrelated illness in May, the full ordinary entitlement is still available, subject only to the normal rolling look-back for other sickness absences. England achieves a comparable result by folding injury in alongside assault within the paragraph 9 ring-fence, with the same six-month full-pay figure and the same non-reckoning rule.

In both jurisdictions the practical gateway is evidential. The absence has to be shown to arise from the employment, which in practice means an accident report filed at the time, an occupational health referral, and medical certification that links the absence to the incident. A teacher who reports an injury informally to a depute head and never files anything in writing will find the causal link much harder to establish months later. The administrative step to take on the day is the one that protects the entitlement.

Infectious disease and notifiable contact

Paragraph 6.34 creates a third protected category, and it closely parallels Burgundy Book paragraph 10 in England. Where an employee is prevented from attending work because of contact with a notifiable infectious disease, they are entitled to full pay during the absence, and such periods should not be reckoned against the entitlement to sickness allowance.

The structure here is the English one — an entitlement plus an express non-reckoning rule — rather than the reclassification approach taken for assault in 6.23. The effect for the teacher is the same: the ordinary scale is untouched.

What is worth drawing out is that this category covers exclusion as well as illness. The trigger in 6.34 is being prevented from attending work because of contact with a notifiable disease, which reaches a teacher who is not ill at all but has been excluded on public health grounds — for instance where a household member has a notifiable condition and the teacher is advised not to attend. England's paragraph 10.3 makes the same provision explicit, adding a duty to notify the employer at once and to take any prescribed precautions, and covering the case where a practitioner considers attendance inadvisable because of infectious disease in the workplace.

England retains one curiosity Scotland does not obviously mirror: Burgundy Book paragraph 10.2 singles out pulmonary tuberculosis for twelve calendar months of full salary where an approved course of treatment is followed, a survival from an earlier public health era that came through the 2023 revision intact. We have not found an equivalent named-disease provision in SNCT Section 6, and we would not want to assert its absence more strongly than that.

Notification and certification: the deadlines that gate entitlement

Paragraphs 6.27 to 6.32 set out the procedural conditions, and they are conditions rather than courtesies — paragraph 6.32 provides that non-compliance results in forfeiture of allowance unless there is an acceptable reason for the failure.

Because Scottish entitlement is counted in certified calendar days, the certification paperwork does more work in Scotland than it does in England. The period a Fit Note covers is the period that counts, which is a reason to be careful about gaps between certificates and about the dates a GP writes rather than the dates you were actually unwell. If a certificate lapses and is renewed late, the administrative position can become genuinely confused, and it is much easier to sort out prospectively than retrospectively.

Where SSP leaves you when the allowance runs out

Because the SNCT allowance absorbs SSP rather than sitting alongside it, the point at which occupational entitlement ends is the point at which SSP becomes visible as a standalone figure — if any of the 28-week SSP maximum remains unused. SSP runs for a maximum of 28 weeks and is administered through payroll with tax and National Insurance deducted. When it ends, or where an employee was never eligible, the employer issues form SSP1, which supports a claim for New Style Employment and Support Allowance or Universal Credit.

For a teacher in the top SNCT band the arithmetic is worth noting: 183 days at full salary is roughly 26 weeks, so SSP's 28-week maximum is very close to exhausted by the time the full-salary tranche ends, and will be gone well before the half-salary tranche does. A Scottish teacher on a very long absence should therefore expect the half-salary period to be genuinely half salary rather than half salary plus a statutory floor, and should ask for the SSP1 in good time, since a New Style ESA claim can be made in advance of SSP ending.

Pension treatment is a reserved-scheme matter rather than an SNCT one: Scottish teachers are members of the Scottish Teachers' Pension Scheme, administered by the Scottish Public Pensions Agency rather than by Teachers' Pensions. The broad principle that periods of reduced pay remain pensionable while at least half salary is in payment is common to the public service schemes, but we would not want to state the STPS rules from the English scheme's guidance, and we have flagged this in the sources section below as something to confirm with SPPA directly.

Part-time teachers and pro rata treatment

The Handbook refers to pro rata arrangements for part-time employees at paragraphs 6.39 and 6.46 but does not set out a worked calculation methodology in the section itself. What can be said with confidence is the part that matters most, and it is favourable: the qualifying test does not discriminate by hours. A qualifying week is any week in which the employee worked regardless of the number of hours, so a teacher on a 0.4 contract reaches the 18-week threshold on exactly the same date as a full-time colleague who started alongside them.

The natural reading of the scheme is that the day counts in 6.6 are not themselves reduced for part-time staff — they are calendar days, and a part-time teacher's calendar has the same number of days in it — while the value of each day is pro-rated, because 6.12 calculates the allowance as 1/365th of the annual rate of salary, and a part-time teacher's annual rate is their actual salary. That produces a coherent result, but we have not found a paragraph stating it in those terms, and councils may operate it differently in payroll. If you are part-time and facing a long absence, ask your council's HR team to set out in writing how they apply 6.39 and 6.46 to your contract. Our guide to part-time and job-share pay covers the wider pro rata principles.

Moving between Scotland and England

Teachers move across the border in both directions, and sick pay is one of the places where nothing carries across. The two schemes are separate collective agreements between different parties. Scottish qualifying council service does not count towards the Burgundy Book's aggregated teaching service with one or more local authorities, and English service does not count towards SNCT continuous qualifying council service. A teacher with eight years in Glasgow who takes a post in Leeds starts the English scale from the beginning, and vice versa.

That is our reading of two documents each drafted by reference to its own jurisdiction's employers, and it is the position we would plan around; but we have not found an express statement in either document ruling cross-border service in or out, and it is possible that an individual council or authority takes a more generous view. It is precisely the sort of question to raise before accepting a post rather than after, and to get answered in writing.

The other cross-border trap is the opposite of the one people expect. A teacher moving to Scotland often assumes the larger headline number means better cover, and for an established teacher with five years' Scottish service that is broadly fair. For a teacher arriving in Scotland it is not: they arrive with nil entitlement and an 18-week wait, whereas a teacher arriving in England arrives with 25 working days of full pay available immediately and, thanks to the aggregation clause, potentially at the top of the English scale from day one if their previous service was with an English or Welsh local authority.

Sources, and what we could not verify

Every paragraph number on this page comes from Part 2, Section 6 of the SNCT Handbook of Conditions of Service for Teachers and Associated Professionals, published as a live wiki by the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers at snct.org.uk. The Handbook is maintained continuously rather than issued in numbered editions, so the reliable course is to check the live page rather than a downloaded copy. The English comparisons are from the revised Burgundy Book of June 2023 and are covered in full on our Burgundy Book sick pay guide.

Primary sources: SNCT Handbook Part 2, Section 6 — Sickness Allowances and Notification Arrangements; SNCT Handbook table of contents; Conditions of Service — SNCT Handbook, EIS; SNCT Circulars — SSTA; Conditions of Service for School Teachers in England and Wales, June 2023 (the Burgundy Book); The Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 3 and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/373; Statutory Sick Pay — GOV.UK.

What we could not verify. Four points on this page are less settled than the rest and are marked as such in the text. First, the detailed pro rata methodology for part-time teachers: paragraphs 6.39 and 6.46 refer to pro rata arrangements without setting out a calculation, and our reading that calendar-day counts are unreduced while the daily rate is pro-rated is an inference from 6.12 rather than an express statement. Second, the treatment of cross-border service between the SNCT and Burgundy Book schemes: neither document appears to address it expressly. Third, the position of short-term supply teachers, which turns on whether intermittent engagements can satisfy the two-week continuity rule, and which is governed alongside Appendix 2.8A. Fourth, the precise Scottish Teachers' Pension Scheme treatment of reduced-pay sickness absence, which is a matter for the Scottish Public Pensions Agency rather than the SNCT and which we have deliberately not stated from English scheme guidance. On all four, get your council's or SPPA's position in writing.