FE Lecturer Pay Explained: Why There Is No National Scale
Further education colleges are not bound by the STPCD and have not been since incorporation in 1993. Pay is set college by college against a non-binding AoC recommendation — and the AoC recommended 3.5% for 2026/27 on 5 October 2026.
Independent guidance, not affiliated with the DfE, Teachers' Pensions or any teaching union.
Short answer
The one-sentence version
If you have arrived here from anywhere else on this site, the thing to understand before anything else is that almost none of it applies to you. This site is built around the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document — M1 to M6, the Upper Pay Range, TLRs, the 1,265-hour directed time cap, the annual STRB cycle. That entire apparatus is a statutory framework for maintained schools in England, and further education colleges sit wholly outside it.
The Department for Education says so in terms you cannot misread. Its own Calculate teacher pay guidance, describing the pay award from 1 September 2026, states that "it does not apply in further education or early years settings". Its education blog of 16 September 2026 is shorter still: "The Department for Education does not set further education pay." The House of Commons Library's own summary of the position is that the government does not set or recommend pay levels for the college sector, that there is no independent pay review body, and that further education and sixth form colleges in England make their own decisions on pay and conditions.
Two precision points, so you do not over-simplify this
What happened in 1993
The reason for all of this is a single structural reform, and it is worth understanding properly because most short accounts of it are subtly wrong.
Before incorporation, colleges were run by local education authorities. Lecturers' pay was set through the statutory Burnham machinery under the Remuneration of Teachers Act 1965, and their conditions came from a national agreement negotiated through the National Joint Council for Further Education and codified in a document universally known as the Silver Book. The Silver Book specified a maximum of 21 contact hours a week and a working year of up to 38 weeks, and the principal union on the staff side was NATFHE.
The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 changed the structure entirely. Further education corporations were established on 30 September 1992 and took over the institutions on the operative date of 1 April 1993, at which point each college became an independent statutory corporation with the power to enter contracts for the employment of teachers and other staff in its own right. Section 26(2) of the Act as enacted provided that existing contracts of employment would have effect from that date as if originally made between the employee and the corporation.
Three details that most accounts get wrong
Its date is genuinely contested. Popular accounts date it to 1975; the more careful academic account has the National Joint Council established in 1979 and the codified Silver Book produced in 1981, with a February 1975 agreement preceding it. We say "mid-1970s to early 1980s" rather than pick one.
It did not simply stop applying on 1 April 1993. Because section 26(2) transferred existing contracts unchanged, Silver Book terms continued to bind existing staff for years. What ended in 1993 was national negotiation. The Colleges Employers Forum, the AoC's predecessor, then pressed for new local contracts, and at least one college was still signing the last of its staff onto new terms in 1996.
UCU's own framing is the cleanest short version and is safe to rely on: incorporation meant the national agreement for FE, the Silver Book, which covered national pay and terms and conditions and hours, no longer applied, and individual colleges developed their own contracts, pay scales and terms and conditions.
Everything else on this page follows from that. There is no statutory document to consult, no national scale to look yourself up on, and no legal answer to the question "what should I be paid?". There is only what your college pays, and what other colleges pay, and a recommendation that some of them apply.
Who negotiates, and what it is worth
National-level discussion happens in the National Joint Forum, which brings together the Association of Colleges on the employers' side and five recognised trade unions on the staff side: GMB, the NEU, UNISON, Unite and UCU. Its output is an annual pay recommendation for individual colleges to adopt.
The word "recommendation" is doing all the work. Nobody involved pretends otherwise:
- UNISON: the AoC does 'not have the power to make binding pay offers, only the government does'. Individual colleges use the recommendation 'as a benchmark in deciding its pay rise', and 'some colleges will negotiate with unions to decide on a pay offer, and others will impose a pay offer'.
- UCU: National Joint Forum pay outcomes 'do not have to be acted upon', and in English further education 'the exception is that the AoC pay recommendation is implemented, the norm is that it is not'.
- The NEU: 'Numerous colleges do not follow the AoC recommendation, which is non-binding.'
- FE Week: 'Unlike schools, colleges decide staff pay awards themselves. The AoC's annual pay proposal is non-binding, so colleges can award pay rises above or below the recommendation.'
The hard evidence on compliance comes from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which obtained pay data from 166 further education colleges covering 2018/19 to 2020/21 — three consecutive years in which the AoC recommended 1%. Over 40% of colleges awarded the recommended amount. And in each of those years, there was no increase in staff pay at all in almost a third of colleges.
Almost a third
Share of FE colleges awarding no pay increase at all, in each of three years when the AoC recommended 1% (IFS, from 166 colleges)
That statistic is the single best answer to the question of what a national recommendation is worth in this sector. It is a reference point and a bargaining anchor, not an entitlement. If you are in a college that has applied every recommendation for the last decade, you are doing considerably better than the sector average — and if you are in one that has not, there is no national mechanism that will make it.
The last published pay scale
The figures below circulate very widely, including on careers sites that present them without a date. They are the AoC's recommended scale effective 1 August 2023, and they are the most recent full scale document the AoC has published.
| Grade | Spine points | Range from 1 August 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Unqualified lecturer | 15 to 21 | £22,387 to £26,281 |
| Qualified lecturer | 23 to 37 | £27,786 to £41,905 |
| Advanced teaching and training | 37 to 41 | £41,905 to £47,156 |
| Leadership and management | 37 to 68 | £41,905 to £104,606 |
These are 2023 figures and we are not going to uprate them for you
It would be easy to compound the percentages and print a 2025/26 scale. We are not going to, for two reasons. First, it would describe a hypothetical college that applied every recommendation in full — and the IFS data above says a great many did not. Second, a calculated figure presented in a table is indistinguishable from a published one to a reader, and that is exactly how stale numbers spread. If you see a "current FE pay scale" anywhere with 2025 or 2026 figures, ask where the underlying AoC document is.
Two further features of the 2023 scale are worth noting. UCU marks every column on it as not agreed by UCU, which tells you something about the character of the machinery. And spine points 36 and 37 on the qualified scale are marked as discretionary recruitment, retention and motivation points — the FE equivalent of the STPCD's recruitment and retention payments, and similarly at the employer's discretion.
For comparison: the confirmed STPCD starting salary for a qualified school teacher in the rest of England for 2026/27 is £34,069 at M1. The 2023 AoC qualified lecturer scale starts at £27,786. Even allowing for three years of uprating at the recommended rates, the entry-level gap is large — which is precisely why the unions' 2026/27 claim asks for the FE starting salary to be set at the school teacher starting salary rather than asking for a percentage.
What lecturers actually earn
Because the scale is advisory and unevenly applied, published medians are a better guide to reality than the scale is. There are two official sources and they use different methods, so we give both.
| Provider type, 2024/25 | Median FTE salary (DfE workforce, 14 May 2026) | Median FTE salary (DfE pension data, 23 April 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| General FE colleges including tertiary | £37,600 | £38,800 |
| Sixth form colleges | £49,700 | £48,800 |
| School-based providers | £49,700 | Not in scope |
| Local authority providers | £33,700 | Not in scope |
| Special post-16 institutions | £32,500 | Not in scope |
| Independent training providers | £32,000 | Not in scope |
The two DfE releases differ because they measure different things. The 14 May 2026 Further education workforce statistics are provider-reported and cover the entire FE sector including independent training providers — 209,500 staff in total, of whom 81,800 are teaching staff. The 23 April 2026 Further education college workforce using teacher pension data release is built from Teachers' Pension Scheme management information and covers the statutory college sector only — 57,000 teachers, up 2.0% on the year, of whom 52,000 are in general FE colleges and 5,100 in sixth form colleges.
The sixth form college line is the one that changes the story
A separate point of caution about careers sites. The Prospects profile for further education teacher, last updated in October 2025, reproduces the 2023 AoC scale — and, to its credit, says explicitly that the figures are AoC recommendations for England, are not necessarily agreed by UCU, and should be seen as a guide only because colleges set their own pay levels. The National Careers Service profile gives a broader "£28,000 starter to £47,000 experienced". The Department's own Teach in further education service quotes an average of £37,000 for a full-time FE teacher, £46,000 for management and £72,000 for leadership, and states plainly that salaries are set by individual colleges rather than a national pay scale. None of these is wrong; they are simply answering different questions with different vintages of data.
Fifteen years of recommendations
The clearest way to see how the sector arrived where it is now is to put the AoC's recommendation next to the STRB's award for the same year. The table below is drawn from the appendix to the unions' own 2026/27 claim, which sources it to the AoC and the Office for National Statistics.
| Year | AoC recommendation | STRB award (schools) | CPI |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-12 | 0.40% | 0% | 4.50% |
| 2012-13 | 0.70% | 0% | 2.80% |
| 2013-14 | 0.70% | 1% | 2.60% |
| 2014-15 | 1.00% | 1% | 1.50% |
| 2015-16 | 0.00% | 1% | 0.00% |
| 2016-17 | 1.00% | 1% | 0.70% |
| 2017-18 | 1.00% | 2% | 2.70% |
| 2018-19 | 1.00% | 3.50% | 2.50% |
| 2019-20 | 1.00% | 2.75% | 1.80% |
| 2020-21 | 1.00% | 2.50% | 0.90% |
| 2021-22 | 1.00% | 0% | 2.60% |
| 2022-23 | 2.50% | 5% | 9.10% |
| 2023-24 | 6.50% | 6.50% | 7.30% |
| 2024-25 | 2.50% | 5.50% | 2.50% |
| 2025-26 | 4.00% | 4.00% | 3.40% |
The decade from 2011 to 2021 is the heart of it: eight consecutive years of a 1% or lower recommendation, while schools moved from 1% to 3.5% and back. The AoC's own evidence to the STRB in October 2025 quantifies the result, putting its cumulative recommendations from 2015/16 to 2025/26 at 21.5% against the STRB's 36.75% plus £250 — a divergence of around fifteen and a half percentage points over eleven years, before you account for the colleges that did not pay the recommendation at all.
Two years are worth singling out. 2015-16 is the only zero on the table, and it triggered a one-day national strike across more than 200 colleges — which is why the June 2026 warning that zero might again be the limit of affordability landed as hard as it did. And 2023-24, at 6.5%, is the one year the AoC matched the STRB exactly. It was able to do so because the Government had announced £200 million of additional funding in July 2023. The pattern is consistent: the AoC can match schools when the money is provided, and cannot when it is not.
The two most recent settled rounds illustrate the same point from the other side. For 2024/25 the AoC recommended 2.5% or £750, whichever was greater, against the schools' 5.5% — and David Hughes said at the time that the £10,000 pay gap between colleges and schools was not justifiable, noting that around 172 college leaders had written jointly to the Chancellor and that £250 million would be needed simply to stop the gap widening. For 2025/26 the AoC recommended 4%, matching schools, but hedged it heavily: the recommendation applies "where colleges' financial circumstances and funding allocations allow", it would be "impossible" for colleges reliant on the Adult Skills Fund which had been cut by up to 6% that year, and for colleges that could reach 4% it would "barely maintain the pay gap, rather than close it".
The 2026/27 round, unresolved
Update, 9 October 2026: the AoC has now recommended 3.5%
As written on 18 September 2026
31 March 2026 — the joint claim goes in
Five unions — Unite, UCU, UNISON, GMB and the NEU — submit a joint pay claim to the Association of Colleges for 2026/27. The headline demand is a 10% or £3,000 increase in pay, whichever is greater, described in the claim as a first step to restore the significant real-terms cuts of the past fifteen years. The claim also asks for pay parity with school teachers within three years, an FE lecturer starting salary set at the school teacher starting salary, Foundation Living Wage accreditation for all colleges, and time-limited talks on binding national bargaining to begin no later than January 2027.
10 June 2026 — the first National Joint Forum meeting produces nothing
The AoC tells the unions it is not in a position to make a pay offer, and indicates that any offer would be low. This is where the phrase that generated headlines originates: employers told the unions that without a material change to college funding, a very low pay award, possibly zero, might be the limit of affordability. The context was a 16-to-19 core funding rate rise of just 0.5% against CPI of 2.8% — a real-terms cut.
18 June 2026 — the joint letter becomes public
FE Week reports a joint letter from the AoC, UCU and UNISON to the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, revealing the employers' warning. Gerry McDonald, who chairs the AoC's Employment Policy Committee, says his committee absolutely does not want to make a very low or zero pay recommendation but that it could be their only option given the funding landscape. It is worth noting how unusual it is for an employers' body and two unions to write jointly to a minister about their own negotiation.
1 July 2026 — £485 million changes the picture
The Government announces £485 million for further education pay over two years: £120 million in financial year 2026-27 and £365 million in 2027-28, explicitly framed as helping colleges match the school teacher pay rise. David Hughes, the AoC's chief executive, says the funding will enable a meaningful pay increase, adding that until then the sector had feared heading towards a potentially very low or even zero award. This single announcement supersedes the zero-award story that had dominated coverage a fortnight earlier.
3 to 17 July 2026 — the Forum reconvenes and defers
The National Joint Forum meets again on 3 July and issues a joint statement, published by the AoC on 17 July. It welcomes the £485 million, records the employers' view that the funding is not sufficient on its own to close the longstanding pay gaps between further education, schools and industry, and records the unions' position that all of the additional funding should go to a pay increase. Crucially, it agrees that the Forum will meet again in September, when the AoC anticipates being able to present a meaningful pay award recommendation. The parties also agree to reopen discussions on a national binding pay framework.
8 July 2026 — the money arrives through the 16-to-19 formula
The 16-to-19 maximum base rate is confirmed as rising from £5,105 to £5,256, a 3% increase reversing the earlier 0.5%. The route matters as much as the amount: the money flows through the national funding rate, T Level rates and disadvantage funding rather than as a ringfenced pay grant. That structurally disadvantages colleges with large adult education and apprenticeship cohorts, which is the recurring reason the AoC says its own recommendations are unaffordable for a substantial share of its members.
11 September 2026 — UCU moves towards a national ballot
UCU's Further Education Committee meets in special session and agrees to proceed with a national ballot of FE members on an aggregated basis, over pay, binding national bargaining and workload. Reported as the first aggregated ballot of England FE members in UCU's history, with a five-week ballot intended to conclude before the end of the autumn term. The significance is structural: last year's disaggregated ballot cleared the national turnout threshold but produced mandates at only 32 of 70 branches, and just 17 struck.
18 September 2026 — still no recommendation (since superseded)
As this page is written, the AoC has published no 2026/27 pay recommendation. Its newsroom's most recent item is from 9 September 2026 and concerns a different subject entirely. No trade press report of a September Forum outcome has appeared. The recommendation is expected, the funding to support it exists, and the AoC's chief executive has said publicly that he hopes to make a recommendation in the autumn — but it has not happened yet, and this page does not pretend otherwise.
What the unions are asking for
A 10% or £3,000 increase, whichever is greater, as a first step towards restoring fifteen years of real-terms cuts. Pay parity with school teachers within three years. An FE lecturer starting salary set at the school teacher starting salary. Foundation Living Wage accreditation for every college. Parity of college support staff pay with school support staff pay. Binding national bargaining, with time-limited talks in autumn 2026 on an interim agreement and talks on a standardised national pay scale to begin no later than January 2027. On workload: a 35-hour week, a maximum of 800 teaching hours a year, a maximum of 22 teaching hours a week, and a maximum of five evenings or weekend days a year.
Where the employers are
The AoC welcomed the £485 million and says it will enable a meaningful pay increase, while maintaining that it is not sufficient on its own to close the longstanding pay gaps between further education, schools and industry. Its position through the round has been that affordability is set by funding it does not control, and that money routed through the 16-to-19 formula reaches colleges with large adult education and apprenticeship provision very unevenly. It has agreed to reopen discussions on a national binding pay framework — a significant concession in principle, given that ending national bargaining was the employers' side's own achievement in 1993.
Why there is no FE pay review body
Every few years someone proposes the obvious solution: give further education an independent pay review body like the School Teachers' Review Body, and let it make evidence-based recommendations across the post-16 sector. It was proposed most recently by the House of Commons Education Committee in its September 2025 report on further education and skills, which recommended a statutory body comparable to the STRB to ensure equity of pay across post-16 education.
The Government responded on 9 December 2025 that there are currently no plans to establish a dedicated pay review body for FE, on the basis that the diversity of colleges means a one-size-fits-all approach to pay may not be appropriate. Reactions were predictable and pointed: David Hughes said the pay gap between school teachers and college lecturers had widened to an unacceptable £12,000, and Jo Grady noted that thirty colleges were set to strike the following month because funding increases had not done enough to close the gap.
It is worth taking the Government's argument seriously rather than dismissing it, because there is something in it. An STRB-style body recommends pay for a workforce doing a reasonably uniform job under a statutory framework. The college sector spans A-level teaching, Level 1 vocational provision, apprenticeships, adult basic skills and higher national qualifications, in institutions whose income mix varies enormously. A single national scale would have to be funded uniformly, and colleges are not funded uniformly. The counter-argument, which the unions make, is that this is an argument for reforming college funding rather than for leaving pay to 208 separate negotiations.
What is on the table instead is binding national bargaining — the unions' central structural demand, and the thing the National Joint Forum agreed in July 2026 to reopen discussions on. That would not be a review body. It would be a return, in modern form, to something closer to what existed before 1993.
What this means if you work in a college
- Your contract is the document that matters. There is no statutory scale behind it and no national document that overrides it. Read it, and read your college's pay policy, because between them they are the whole of your entitlement.
- Find out whether your college applies the AoC recommendation. This is the single most useful question you can ask about your own pay, and the answer varies enormously between colleges. Your union branch will know.
- Do not benchmark against a published scale. The last one is from August 2023 and a third of colleges may never have applied the recommendations since. Benchmark against current adverts at comparable colleges instead — and note that AoC Jobs closed on 9 June 2026, so FE Week's jobs board and jobs.ac.uk are the places to look.
- Your pension is not affected by any of this. Colleges are in the Teachers' Pension Scheme by law, with no withdrawal route. See our page on FE and the TPS — it is the one part of your package that is identical to a school teacher's.
- Check whether you are eligible for the FE targeted retention incentive. It is a separate DfE scheme worth £2,000 to £6,000 for early-career teachers in seven shortage subjects. Round two closed in May 2026 and no round three has been announced, but the details are worth knowing in case one opens.
- If you are considering a move into schools, QTLS is the route. Active QTLS with ETF membership satisfies the statutory qualification requirement in maintained schools and puts you on the qualified teacher pay range. Our QTLS page sets out how it works and where it does not apply.
A final observation about the shape of this sector, which is easy to miss when you are inside it. In schools, pay is a national political question settled once a year by a process everyone can watch. In further education, pay is 208 separate negotiations, informed by a recommendation nobody has to follow, funded through a formula designed for something else. That is not an accident or an oversight; it is the direct and intended consequence of the 1992 Act. Whether it has worked is the subject of the rest of this section.
Sources and accuracy
The scope of the STPCD is from the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document 2025 and from the Department for Education's Calculate teacher pay guidance, last updated 1 July 2026, and its education blog of 16 September 2026. The 1993 incorporation history is from the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, including section 26(2) as enacted, and the Education (Further Education Corporations) Order 1992; the account of the Silver Book and of the transition to local contracts draws on academic work on English further education policy and on contemporaneous trade press, with the date of the Silver Book flagged in the text as contested. The composition of the National Joint Forum and the non-binding status of its recommendations are from the AoC's own pay negotiation statement of 17 July 2026, UCU's further education pay materials and UNISON's further education pay campaign pages. The compliance evidence from 166 colleges is from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The 1 August 2023 pay scale is from UCU's record of English FE pay scales, which remains the most recent published AoC scale. Median salary figures are from the Department for Education's Further education workforce statistics for 2024/25 (published 14 May 2026) and Further education college workforce using teacher pension data (published 23 April 2026). The recommendation history table is from the appendix to the joint trade unions' 2026/27 pay claim, sourced there to the AoC and ONS, with the AoC's cumulative comparison from its October 2025 evidence to the STRB. The 2026/27 timeline is from the joint union claim, FE Week reporting of 13 April, 18 June, 1 July and 8 July 2026, and the AoC's statement of 17 July 2026. The pay review body position is from the Government's response of 9 December 2025 to the Education Committee. The revocation of the FE teaching qualification requirements is from SI 2013/1976, in force 1 September 2013. STPCD cash figures are the confirmed 2026/27 values following the Government's acceptance of the STRB's 36th Report on 1 July 2026.
Several things on this page are explicitly flagged as unresolved rather than smoothed over: the absence of a 2026/27 AoC recommendation, the contested date of the Silver Book, the fact that no published AoC pay scale exists after August 2023, and the AoC's own inconsistency between 213 and 208 colleges. We have deliberately not calculated an updated pay scale from the percentage recommendations, and we have not quoted the £12,500 pay gap figure as a settled statistic — it comes from a private letter reported in the trade press, and the competing estimates are set out on our separate pay gap page. The UCU aggregated ballot decision of 11 September 2026 rests on a single partisan secondary source and is described as reported rather than confirmed. This is independent guidance for orientation, not employment or financial advice, and it is not affiliated with the Association of Colleges, the Department for Education or any trade union.
Frequently asked questions
Are FE colleges covered by the STPCD? +
No, and this is the single most important structural fact about college pay. The School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document applies to teachers employed by a local authority or by the governing body of a foundation, voluntary aided or foundation special school in the provision of primary or secondary education. Further education colleges are none of those things. The Department for Education puts it plainly in its own 'Calculate teacher pay' guidance, which states of the annual pay award that 'it does not apply in further education or early years settings', and its education blog of 16 September 2026 says simply that the Department does not set further education pay. Note that academies are not legally bound by the STPCD either — they follow it by choice — and sixth form colleges are outside it too, though they have their own binding national machinery.
So who does set FE lecturer pay? +
Your individual college does. Each college in England is an independent statutory corporation established under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, and it is its own employer with its own power to enter contracts of employment. Pay is determined locally, usually through negotiation with recognised unions at college level. Above that sits the National Joint Forum, where the Association of Colleges and five unions — GMB, NEU, UNISON, Unite and UCU — produce an annual pay recommendation. But a recommendation is exactly what it is. UNISON's own campaign material is blunt about it: the AoC does 'not have the power to make binding pay offers, only the government does'. Individual colleges use the recommendation as a benchmark, and some negotiate while others impose.
How closely do colleges actually follow the AoC recommendation? +
Less closely than the word 'recommendation' suggests, and we have real data on this rather than an impression. The Institute for Fiscal Studies obtained pay data from 166 FE colleges covering 2018/19 to 2020/21, three years in which the AoC recommended 1% each time. It found that over 40% of colleges awarded the recommended amount — and that there was no increase in staff pay at all in almost a third of colleges in each of those years. UCU puts it more sharply still, saying that in English FE the exception is that the AoC recommendation is implemented and the norm is that it is not. That is the practical meaning of non-binding: a national figure can be agreed and a third of the workforce can see nothing.
What is the current FE lecturer pay scale? +
There is not a current one, and that is a real finding rather than a gap in our research. The last full AoC recommended pay scale document was for 1 August 2023, and UCU's national record of English FE pay scales — the definitive public archive — was last updated in January 2024 with that as its most recent column. Since then the AoC has issued percentage recommendations rather than new scale documents: 2.5% or £750 for 2024/25, 4% for 2025/26, and nothing yet for 2026/27. So the widely circulated figures of £27,786 to £41,905 for a qualified lecturer are genuinely the 2023 numbers, and any site presenting them as current is three years out of date. We have not uprated them ourselves, because a calculated figure for a hypothetical fully compliant college is not a published scale.
What do FE lecturers actually earn, then? +
The better question, and there is good official data. The Department for Education's release built from teacher pension records, published on 23 April 2026, gives a median full-time equivalent salary for teaching staff in general further education colleges of £38,800 in 2024/25, up 3.8% on the year, against £48,800 in sixth form colleges. Its separate provider-reported workforce release of 14 May 2026 gives £37,600 for general FE colleges including tertiary, £49,700 for sixth form colleges, £32,000 for independent training providers, £33,700 for local authority providers and £32,500 for special post-16 institutions. Those medians describe what is actually being paid, which is more useful than a scale that a third of colleges may not be applying.
Has the AoC made a 2026/27 pay recommendation yet? +
Yes. On 5 October 2026 the AoC recommended a 3.5% pay rise for college staff for 2026/27, matching the schools' award and encouraging colleges in a good financial position to go beyond it; it is non-binding. See our FE pay rise tracker for the detail. The rest of this answer records the position as at 18 September 2026, when no recommendation had been published. The National Joint Forum agreed on 3 July 2026 to meet again in September, when the AoC said it anticipated being able to present a meaningful pay award recommendation, and the AoC's chief executive said in early July that the intention was to make a recommendation in the autumn. Colleges were waiting for their funding allocations to be confirmed in September. But the AoC's newsroom carries nothing on pay since its 17 July statement, and no trade press report of a September outcome had appeared when we wrote this. Treat any figure you see for 2026/27 with suspicion until the AoC publishes it.
Is a 'possibly zero' pay award still on the cards for 2026/27? +
Almost certainly not, and it is important to date that story correctly because it is still circulating. The warning came from a joint AoC, UCU and UNISON letter to the Education Secretary reported on 18 June 2026, in which employers said that without a material change to college funding a very low pay award, possibly zero, might be the limit of affordability. Thirteen days later, on 1 July, the Government announced £485 million for FE pay over two years. The AoC's chief executive said at that point that the funding would enable a meaningful pay increase and that until then the sector had feared exactly the outcome the letter described. So the zero warning was real, it was employers' own words, and it has been substantially overtaken. For context, the last time the AoC actually recommended zero was 2015-16, which triggered a one-day national strike across more than 200 colleges.
Do I need a teaching qualification to lecture in FE? +
Not as a matter of law. The Further Education Teachers' Qualifications (England) Regulations 2007 were revoked with effect from 1 September 2013 by SI 2013/1976, following the Lingfield review of professionalism in further education — and the explanatory note to the revoking instrument says exactly what that means: it is no longer compulsory for teachers to obtain these qualifications before they are employed by a further education institution. Note the date: the mandatory Institute for Learning registration and continuing professional development requirements went in September 2012, but the qualification requirements themselves survived a further year. In practice almost every college expects you to hold or work towards a teaching qualification. The Department for Education's own 'Teach in further education' service now names the Level 5 Diploma in Teaching (FE and Skills) as the industry standard, which has superseded the older Level 5 Diploma in Education and Training in DfE's terminology.
How many colleges are there, and how many staff? +
The AoC's own list, headed August 2026, records 208 colleges in England — 153 general further education, 35 sixth form, 9 land-based, 2 art, design and performing arts, and 9 specialist designated institutions and institutes of adult learning. Be careful with this number: the AoC's College Key Facts page still says 213 as at September 2025, and the IFS counted 218 in October 2024 against 348 in 2010. The count falls by roughly five a year through merger, and it counts corporations rather than campuses — a single entry like New City College covers many sites. On staffing, the AoC says colleges employ 133,000 people of whom 54,000 are teaching staff, though its own endnote warns that most of those statistics relate to 2023/24.
Will there be an FE pay review body like the STRB? +
Not in the near future. The House of Commons Education Committee recommended in its September 2025 report on further education and skills that a statutory pay review body comparable to the School Teachers' Review Body be established, to provide independent, evidence-based pay recommendations and ensure equity of pay across the post-16 sector. The Government responded on 9 December 2025 that there are currently no plans to establish a dedicated pay review body for FE, arguing that the diversity of colleges means a one-size-fits-all approach to pay may not be appropriate. The unions' 2026/27 claim asks instead for binding national bargaining, and the National Joint Forum agreed in July 2026 to reopen discussions on a national pay bargaining framework — but that is a negotiation about a negotiation, not a review body.
Related guides
The FE and School Teacher Pay Gap
£5,500, £10,400 or £12,500 — three credible estimates, three methodologies, and why they disagree.
Sixth Form College Teacher Pay Explained
The post-16 sector that does have a national pay spine — and pays close to school teacher rates.
FE Lecturers and the Teachers' Pension Scheme
The one part of the package that is identical to a school teacher's, by law, with no way out for your employer.
FE Contracts, Holidays and Redundancy
The conditions side of the same story — no Burgundy Book, no directed time cap, and holiday set college by college.
The FE Targeted Retention Incentive
£2,000 to £6,000 for early-career teachers in seven shortage subjects — a separate scheme from the schools one.
QTLS vs QTS: Teaching in Schools
The crossover route from a college to a maintained school classroom, at qualified teacher pay.
Teacher Pay Scales 2026/27
The confirmed STPCD ranges college pay is measured against — M1 to M6, UPS, TLRs and London weighting.
Teacher Pay Rise 2026/27 STRB Tracker
How the schools pay round works — the process further education does not have.