Upper Pay Range Threshold Assessment Explained

What threshold assessment actually is

Every qualified teacher starts their career on the Main Pay Range, progressing from M1 through to M6 over time, linked to successful annual appraisal outcomes rather than automatic time-served increments. The Main Pay Range has a genuine ceiling at M6, though — from there, the only way to a higher classroom-based pay point is to apply to cross what's generally called "the threshold" onto the Upper Pay Range (UPR), which runs from U1 to U3.

Crossing the threshold is deliberately not automatic and isn't simply a reward for years of service at M6. The core requirement set out in the STPCD is that a teacher demonstrates they are consistently operating at a substantially higher standard of practice than is expected at the top of the Main Pay Range, assessed directly against the Teachers' Standards and evidenced over a meaningful period rather than a single good lesson or a single strong year.

The two statutory criteria, in full

It's worth reading the actual test, because it's short, and because almost every disagreement about a threshold application comes down to how one of its two limbs has been interpreted. Paragraph 15.2 of the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document provides that an application from a qualified teacher will be successful where the relevant body is satisfied:

• (a) that the teacher is "highly competent in all elements of the relevant standards" — meaning every one of the eight Teachers' Standards in Part One plus Part Two on personal and professional conduct, not a strong overall average with one or two weaker areas carried by the rest; and
• (b) that the teacher's "achievements and contribution to an educational setting or settings are substantial and sustained" — a separate test about impact and durability, which is where evidence spanning a single strong year most often falls short.

Three further points from the same paragraph matter in practice. Paragraph 15.1 provides that qualified teachers may apply at least once a year in line with their school's pay policy, and that where you're subject to the appraisal regulations the relevant body must have regard to the assessments and recommendations in your appraisal reports. Paragraph 15.3 requires the school's pay policy to set out the process for assessing applications and to make clear how it will interpret those two criteria — so the detail genuinely is local, and genuinely should be written down somewhere you can read. And paragraph 15.4 provides that any decision under paragraph 15 "applies only to employment in that same school", which has real consequences if you move, covered below.

Upper Pay Range 2026/27 figures

The table below shows the confirmed 2026/27 Upper Pay Range figures, with the top of the Main Pay Range (M6) shown alongside for comparison. These are the national figures the Government confirmed on 1 July 2026 when it accepted the STRB's 36th Report in full, applying a 3.5% uplift from 1 September 2026 — see the full 2026/27 pay scales guide for the complete picture, including how academy trusts can and sometimes do set their own points.

Reaching U3 eventually, from a standing start at M6, represents a National-rate gap of £5,895 a year — though, as covered below, that's typically built up gradually across several successful appraisal cycles rather than gained in one move.

The application and assessment process

The exact process varies slightly by school, since your own school's pay policy sets some of the specific detail, but the broad sequence is consistent across the vast majority of maintained schools and academies that follow the national approach. Here's how it typically runs from first considering an application through to a decision.

What evidence actually helps

Because "substantially higher level of practice than expected at the top of the Main Pay Range" is a genuinely subjective standard on paper, the practical difference between a strong and a weak application usually comes down to how specifically the evidence is presented, not how many years you've been teaching.

• Specific, dated examples tied to individual Teachers' Standards, not generic statements like 'I am a good teacher'.
• Evidence spanning a reasonable period (commonly at least a full academic year) rather than a single strong term.
• Pupil outcome or progress data that's genuinely attributable to your own teaching, with context explaining any unusual factors.
• Evidence of impact beyond your own classroom — mentoring, curriculum contribution, or supporting colleagues.
• Written feedback from lesson observations and learning walks that explicitly supports the standard being claimed.
• A clear, honest account of how you've responded to any previous developmental feedback, rather than omitting it.

What sufficient evidence looks like against each Teachers' Standard

Because paragraph 15.2(a) requires you to be highly competent in all elements of the standards, the most common structural weakness in an application is uneven coverage: three standards evidenced beautifully, two covered by a single generic sentence. The table below sets out, for each of the eight Part One standards, the kind of specific artefact that actually carries weight with a panel — as distinct from the assertion it's usually replaced with. These are illustrative examples of good practice, not a checklist mandated by the STPCD; your own school's pay policy is what defines the evidence it will accept.

Part Two of the standards — personal and professional conduct — is rarely written about explicitly in an application and rarely needs to be, since it's usually evidenced by the absence of any concern on your record. It's worth knowing it forms part of the test, though, because a live conduct or capability matter is one of the few things that will straightforwardly prevent a successful application regardless of how strong the teaching evidence is.

Why threshold is assessed more strictly in some schools than others

Teachers comparing notes across schools often conclude that one of them must be applying the rules wrongly. Much more often, both are applying them correctly — because the STPCD deliberately delegates the interpretation. The statutory criteria in paragraph 15.2 are national; paragraph 15.3 then requires each relevant body to set out in its own pay policy "how it will interpret the criteria" and what evidence it will take into account. Two schools can therefore hold genuinely different bars for "highly competent" and both be compliant.

Several structural factors push that variation in predictable directions:

• Budget pressure. Crossing the threshold is a permanent, non-reversible increase to a school's staffing cost. A school with a deficit recovery plan has an obvious incentive to interpret the criteria tightly, and the STPCD's delegation of interpretation gives it the room to do so lawfully.
• Staffing profile. A school where most of the teaching body is already on the Upper Pay Range has less headroom than one with a young staff, and is more likely to have a pay policy that tests the 'substantial and sustained' limb hard.
• Recruitment market. Schools in areas with acute recruitment difficulty tend to apply the criteria more generously, because a declined application in a tight market risks losing the teacher entirely. Schools that recruit easily face less of that pressure.
• Who assesses. The relevant body has legal responsibility for the process but may delegate receipt and assessment of applications to the headteacher, in line with the pay policy. A process run by one headteacher against their own judgement will feel different from one run by a panel against a written rubric.
• Trust-wide policy. In a multi-academy trust the pay policy is usually set at trust level, which tends to reduce variation between the trust's schools while potentially increasing the difference between that trust and a neighbouring local authority school.

There's one piece of genuine, national asymmetry worth knowing about, and it catches teachers out when they move. Under paragraph 14.2, a relevant body must pay you on the Upper Pay Range if your successful application was made to that school and you've remained there without a break in continuity of employment. But paragraph 14.3 provides only that a relevant body may pay you on the Upper Pay Range where you were a post-threshold teacher elsewhere, or where your successful application was made to a different educational setting. Combined with paragraph 15.4 — "any decision made under paragraph 15 applies only to employment in that same school" — this means Upper Pay Range status is not automatically portable between schools in the way most teachers assume.

How the Upper Pay Range interacts with performance-related pay

This is the part of the framework that has changed most in recent years, and where older guidance is most likely to mislead. For roughly a decade from 2013, pay progression for classroom teachers was mandatorily linked to performance: schools had to have a performance-related pay policy, and progression was something to be earned each year rather than expected. That is no longer the position.

Paragraph 19.2 of the current STPCD now states that pay progression must be awarded, subject to two specific exceptions, and requires a written pay recommendation for every teacher following the outcome of the school's appraisal arrangements. The exceptions are:

Two practical consequences follow for anyone thinking about the Upper Pay Range. First, the threshold application itself sits outside this progression framework: paragraph 15 is a separate assessment against the two statutory criteria, and a school that has abolished performance-related pay for progression purposes still runs a genuine, evidence-based threshold assessment. Crossing onto U1 has never been an automatic entitlement and is not one now.

Second, once you're on the Upper Pay Range, movement from U1 to U2 and U2 to U3 is ordinary pay progression, and is therefore governed by paragraph 19.2. In a school that has dropped performance-related pay, that means your progression up the Upper Pay Range can only be withheld if you're in capability proceedings. In a school that has retained it, it can only be withheld for reasons related to poor performance, evidenced through appraisal. If progression is withheld from you for any other reason — an unaffordable budget, a cap on how many teachers can progress in a year — that is a decision worth appealing, and the appeals route below is how.

The school's pay policy must set out clearly which model it uses and how progression will be determined. If you genuinely don't know whether your school retains performance-related pay, that document is the place to look, and it's the single most useful thing to read before either applying for threshold or challenging a progression decision.

After U1: how U2 and U3 progression actually works

Once you've successfully crossed onto U1, the process changes in a way that catches some teachers by surprise: you don't need to build a fresh threshold-style case at every subsequent point. Movement from U1 to U2, and from U2 to U3, is generally linked to the outcome of your ordinary annual appraisal in the same way Main Pay Range progression works, with most schools treating continued strong performance at Upper Pay Range level as the baseline expectation rather than requiring an entirely new substantial-practice case each year.

There's also no requirement to reach U3 by any particular point in a career, and no penalty for not doing so. A meaningful number of experienced, highly capable teachers spend long stretches of their career on U1 or U2 without ever moving further — this generally reflects that Upper Pay Range progression beyond the initial threshold is treated as routine appraisal-linked movement, not a sign that anything has gone wrong or that a teacher's practice has stalled.

It's worth remembering, too, that U3 is a genuine ceiling for a classroom-only role. The STPCD doesn't provide a "U4" or any equivalent higher classroom point — further pay increases from U3 for a teacher who wants to remain primarily in the classroom generally come from taking on a defined additional responsibility via a TLR (see our TLR payments explained guide) rather than any higher point on a classroom-only scale.

Does threshold work differently in academies?

Academies and free schools aren't legally bound by the STPCD, which means they aren't strictly required to run a threshold process identical to the one described above. In practice, the overwhelming majority of academy trusts do run a broadly equivalent process, since the underlying idea — recognising sustained, high-quality practice with a genuine pay increase — is one most trusts want to preserve for recruitment and retention reasons even where they're free to depart from the national approach. Where trusts do vary the detail, it's most commonly around the exact eligibility window, the specific evidence format required, or (occasionally) the terminology used rather than the underlying principle of an assessed, non-automatic move onto a higher classroom pay band.

A smaller number of trusts have gone further and restructured their entire pay progression model away from the STPCD's Main/Upper Pay Range split altogether, sometimes replacing it with a single, longer classroom pay scale without a discrete threshold step. If you work for a trust like this, the concept of "crossing the threshold" as described in this guide may not map directly onto your own school's pay policy at all — always check your specific trust's published pay policy document rather than assuming the national process applies unmodified.

Worked example: one teacher's route from M6 to U3

Scale points on their own can be hard to translate into a felt sense of career progress, so here's a simplified, illustrative timeline for a teacher who successfully crosses the threshold and later reaches U3, using the 2026/27 National-rate figures from earlier on this page. Real timelines vary considerably by individual and school, so treat the specific years used here as illustrative rather than typical or guaranteed.

Two things are worth noticing in a timeline like this. First, the single biggest jump usually happens at the threshold crossing itself, not at the subsequent U1-to-U2 or U2-to-U3 moves — which is exactly why the threshold application is worth investing real preparation time in, rather than treating it as procedurally equivalent to an ordinary annual appraisal. Second, every step in this table also compounds into your Teachers' Pension Scheme CARE pot, since each year's higher salary adds a proportionally larger slice to your pension for that year — a detail that's easy to overlook when thinking about threshold purely in terms of the in-year pay rise. See our Teachers' Pension Scheme guide for exactly how that accrual mechanism works.

If your application is declined

A declined threshold application is a genuine, substantive outcome rather than a formality, but it isn't necessarily permanent. Most schools allow a teacher to reapply in a future cycle once they've had a reasonable opportunity to build further evidence, particularly addressing whatever specific area the panel felt was weaker.

• Ask for specific, written feedback on exactly which standards or evidence areas fell short, rather than a general 'not ready yet'.
• Agree a concrete plan with your line manager for the evidence you'll build over the coming appraisal cycle.
• Check your school's specific policy on when you're able to reapply, since this can vary between schools.
• Consider whether a union representative's input would help if you believe the process wasn't followed fairly.

Treating a decline as specific, actionable feedback rather than a permanent verdict on your teaching is usually the most productive response, and the large majority of teachers who reapply with genuinely strengthened evidence do go on to succeed in a later cycle. If you believe the decision itself was wrong rather than simply disappointing, though, there is a formal route — and it's a more structured one than most teachers realise.

How a pay appeal actually works

A declined threshold application is a pay determination, and every pay determination carries a right of review. The STPCD's statutory guidance requires that a school's pay policy "must also set out the procedures that apply when any teacher seeks a review of any decision made by the headteacher or relevant body that affects their pay". Two features of that framework are worth understanding before you start.

The pay appeal replaces the grievance procedure, it doesn't run alongside it. The guidance is explicit that the pay hearings and appeals procedure "performs the function of the grievance procedure on pay matters and therefore decisions should not be reopened under general grievance procedures". So if you're unhappy with a threshold outcome, the pay appeal is the route — raising it as a grievance instead will normally just be redirected, costing you time against a deadline. Separately, an appeal decision doesn't affect your statutory employment rights, so the internal route doesn't extinguish anything you might otherwise be able to pursue.

The clock starts from written notification. Paragraph 3.4 of the STPCD requires the relevant body, once it has determined a teacher's remuneration, to notify the teacher in writing "at the earliest opportunity — and in any event not later than one month after the determination", along with details of where the school's staffing structure and pay policy may be inspected. That written notification is the document your appeal deadline runs from. If you've been told verbally that your application was unsuccessful but have had nothing in writing, ask for it — both because you're entitled to it and because the timetable below depends on it.