FE and Sixth Form College Pay in England

Why this section exists

Post-16 education in England is delivered by institutions that look similar from the outside and are governed entirely differently underneath. A seventeen-year-old studying A-level chemistry might be taught in a school sixth form, a sixth form college, a general further education college or a 16-to-19 academy. Their teacher's salary, working hours, holiday entitlement, notice period and redundancy terms will be set by four different mechanisms, and in three of those four cases there is no statutory document to look it up in.

That produces an unusual amount of misinformation, and the misinformation runs in a consistent direction: material written about school teachers gets applied to college lecturers, because both are teaching, both are in the Teachers' Pension Scheme, and both are usually called teachers. So college lecturers are told about directed time caps they do not have, PPA entitlements that do not apply to them, retention payments for subjects that are not on their list, and pay scales that were last published three years ago.

This section is deliberately not a general guide to working in further education. It covers the points where the college and school systems genuinely touch, because those are the points where confusion is most expensive: pensions, the crossover qualification, the two retention schemes with the same name, and the pay gap that the whole sector argues about.

Three categories, not one

Before you read anything else here, work out which of these describes your employer, because the answer determines which page applies to you.

A general further education college is a further education corporation teaching everything from Level 1 vocational provision through to higher national qualifications, with a large adult and apprenticeship cohort alongside its 16-to-19 students. It has no national pay scale and no national conditions document. Its teaching staff had a median full-time equivalent salary of £37,600 in 2024/25 on DfE's provider-reported figures.

A sixth form college is a sixth form college corporation, a distinct statutory category created in 2010, at least 80% of whose enrolment must be above compulsory school age and under nineteen. It does have national machinery: a nine-point pay spine negotiated through the National Joint Council for Staff in Sixth Form Colleges, and a conditions handbook known as the Red Book that includes a 1,265-hour directed time framework. Its teaching staff had a median of £49,700 in 2024/25 — the same figure DfE records for school-based providers.

A 16-to-19 academy is a sixth form college that has converted to academy status. It is an academy, which puts it in the schools funding and pay world rather than this one — though, confusingly, its teachers sit inside the further education version of the Targeted Retention Incentive rather than the schools version.

The guides

How we handle what is not settled

Further education pay is a fast-moving area with unusually poor published data, and a great deal of what circulates about it is stale, mis-sectored or arithmetically derived from something else. These pages were written on 18 September 2026, and several of them describe positions that were genuinely unresolved at that moment: no 2026/27 AoC pay recommendation had been published, no 2026/27 sixth form college award had been agreed, no third round of the FE Targeted Retention Incentive had been announced, and the regulations behind the 2027 academy QTS requirement did not yet exist.

Rather than smoothing over those gaps, each page says what is confirmed, what is reported and what we could not verify at all. Where we found a widely circulated figure to be wrong — the "27 per cent" pay gap that is not NFER's figure, the claim that the TPS employer rate was under 10% in 2010 when it was 14.1%, the FE redundancy numbers that come from a 2012 article, the "£10,500" attributed to a report that never published it — we say so and give the correct version. Where we could not find a source, such as for legacy Silver Book notice periods or a 2024/25 pay scale, we have left the gap visible rather than filling it with plausible arithmetic.