The FE and School Teacher Pay Gap: £5,500, £10,400 or £12,500?
Three credible published estimates of the gap between college lecturer and school teacher pay, from the IFS, NFER and the Association of Colleges — what each one actually measures, why they disagree, and the sixth form college caveat that almost every summary leaves out.
Independent guidance, not affiliated with the DfE, Teachers' Pensions or any teaching union.
Short answer
There is no single correct figure, and the differences between the published estimates are almost entirely methodological rather than factual.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies, in October 2024, put the gap at £5,500 or 15% for 2023/24, forecasting nearly £7,000 or 18% for 2024/25. The National Foundation for Educational Research, in March 2026, put it at 20% for 2024/25 — a median full-time FE teacher on £39,355 against £49,789 for a secondary teacher, implying £10,434. The Association of Colleges, in its October 2025 evidence to the STRB, calculated £12,784, and £12,500 was reported from a joint AoC, UCU and UNISON letter in June 2026.
The caveat that matters most, and that almost every summary omits: this is a general further education college phenomenon. Sixth form college teaching staff had a median of £49,700 in 2024/25 — the same figure DfE records for school-based providers.
Why there is no single number
"College lecturers earn ten thousand pounds less than school teachers" is one of the most-repeated statistics in English education policy. It appears in union campaign material, in select committee evidence, in ministerial questions and in most journalism about the further education sector. It is also, depending on who you ask and which year you mean, somewhere between £5,500 and £12,784.
That spread is not evidence that somebody is being dishonest. Every figure on this page comes from a serious institution showing its working. The spread exists because "the pay gap between FE lecturers and school teachers" is not one quantity. It is a comparison between two populations that have to be defined before they can be measured, and every reasonable way of defining them gives a different answer.
This page sets out the three main estimates with their sources, dates and methods, explains what drives the differences, and is honest about which one we would use for which purpose. It does not pick a winner, because picking one would create a false impression of precision — the same approach we take on the equivalent question for school teachers on our page asking whether teacher pay has fallen since 2010, which works through the deflator and pay-point methodology in detail. We will not repeat that discussion here.
Estimate one: the IFS — £5,500, rising to nearly £7,000
The source is The state of college finances in England by Bruno Moura and Imran Tahir, published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on 24 October 2024 as part of its Autumn Budget series.
Its finding, in its own words: in 2023/24, the median salary for school teachers was approximately £44,000, compared with £38,000 for full-time college teachers — a gap of £5,500 or 15%. The report projected that this would increase to nearly £7,000 or 18% in 2024/25, which it described as the largest salary gap on record.
It also gives the historical baseline, which is the most useful thing in it. In 2010/11, in 2024 prices, the median salary was around £51,000 for a school teacher and around £46,000 for a college teacher — a gap of about 12%. Between 2010/11 and 2023/24, the median salary for school teachers fell by 15% while the median salary for college teachers fell by 17%. The gap widened because both fell and college pay fell further.
What the IFS figure actually measures
Two honest caveats. The IFS does not state whether the school teacher median excludes leadership, and DfE's headline median teacher pay is explicitly "for all teachers, regardless of grade" — which means it probably includes headteachers and other leadership, and that widens the gap. The IFS does acknowledge a related point, noting that a higher median salary for school teachers may reflect the fact that school teachers are more experienced than college teachers. And the figures are now approaching two years old: the £7,000 was a forecast made before the 2025/26 award and before the £485 million announcement, and no updated IFS gap figure exists. The institute's Annual report on education spending in England: 2025–26, published on 21 January 2026, contains no teacher pay analysis and cites the earlier work rather than updating it.
Estimate two: the NFER — 20%, implying £10,434
The source is The Further Education Teacher Workforce in England Annual Report 2026 by Michael Scott, Lillian Flemons and Jack Worth, published by the National Foundation for Educational Research on 12 March 2026 and funded by the Nuffield Foundation.
Its finding, in its own words: in 2024/25, the median full-time FE teacher received around £39,400 compared to £49,800 for the average full-time secondary teacher, a gap of 20 per cent. Between 2010/11 and 2019/20, the median full-time FE teacher earned around ten per cent less than the median full-time secondary school teacher.
| Median full-time earnings, England (nominal) | 2010/11 | 2019/20 | 2024/25 |
|---|---|---|---|
| FE teachers | £32,645 | £31,887 | £39,355 |
| Secondary school teachers | £36,756 | £40,490 | £49,789 |
| Gap | £4,111 | £8,603 | £10,434 |
The 2019/20 column is the one worth pausing on. FE teachers' median nominal earnings were lower in 2019/20 than in 2010/11 — before adjusting for a decade of inflation — while secondary teachers' rose by around £3,700. That is the decade of 1% recommendations described on our FE lecturer pay page, visible in a single row.
Two figures widely attributed to NFER that NFER did not publish
The "27 per cent" in circulation is wrong. FE Week's 12 March 2026 report said FE teaching staff earn on average 27 per cent less than their peers in secondary schools. NFER's own figure is 20 per cent. The £10,434 gap is 21% of the secondary salary and 26.5% of the FE salary, so the 27% appears to come from dividing by the FE figure while describing the result as "less than" the school figure — a direction-of-comparison error. Use NFER's number.
And on "widest in 15 years": NFER's own wording is "widest since at least 2010". Its series begins in 2010/11, so this is a statement about the limits of the data rather than evidence that earlier gaps were narrower. NFER's phrasing is the safer one.
On method, NFER uses the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, taking median full-time earnings without controls for the headline school comparison. Its definition of an FE teacher is occupational and industrial: Further Education Teaching Professionals, plus teachers and trainers in technical and vocational secondary education and post-secondary non-tertiary education. That is broader than "college lecturer" — it includes independent training provider staff, whose median on DfE's own figures is £32,000 — and that breadth pulls the FE average down and widens the measured gap relative to a college-only comparison. The comparator is all secondary school teachers, which in ASHE terms includes leadership.
Do not confuse this with the 2024 NFER report for Gatsby
Estimate three: the AoC — £12,784, reported as £12,500
The largest figure comes from the employers, which is itself informative. The Association of Colleges' evidence to the School Teachers' Review Body for its 36th report, submitted in October 2025, states that the pay difference is now £12,784 between schools, at a median school teacher pay of £49,084, and further education teachers, at £36,300 from FE workforce data for 2023/24. Its covering letter rounds this to "a substantial £12,000 pay gap".
A separate figure of £12,500 was reported by FE Week in June and July 2026, sourced to a joint letter from the AoC, UCU and UNISON to the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson. That letter has not been published, so the figure is traceable only to trade press reporting of a private document and should be cited that way.
The AoC calculation has a year mismatch, and the AoC's own chief executive gives a different number
But the AoC's school comparator is arguably the fairest of the three. £49,084 is the classroom teacher median, which means leadership is excluded — a more like-for-like comparison than the all-grades medians the IFS and NFER comparisons rest on.
And there is an internal inconsistency worth knowing. In the same FE Week article of 1 July 2026 that reports the £12,500, David Hughes — the AoC's own chief executive — describes the gap as "in excess of £10,000 per year". When the organisation producing the largest figure quotes a smaller one in the same week, treat £12,500 as a campaigning round number rather than a settled statistic.
The four axes that make them differ
Rather than treating the disagreement as noise, it is more useful to see exactly which four choices generate it. Every estimate has to make all four, and there is no obviously right answer to any of them.
| Choice | IFS (Oct 2024) | NFER (Mar 2026) | AoC (Oct 2025) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who counts as an FE teacher | General FE colleges only, from DfE college workforce tables; ~50,000 teachers; sixth form colleges excluded | ASHE occupational and industrial categories, including independent training providers | DfE FE workforce data |
| Who counts as a school teacher | DfE School Workforce median, all grades — so probably including leadership | All secondary school teachers in ASHE, including leadership | Median classroom teacher pay — leadership excluded |
| Which year | 2023/24 observed; 2024/25 forecast | 2024/25 both sides | 2024/25 schools against 2023/24 FE |
| How expressed | Cash and % of school pay | % of school pay (20%) | Cash |
Two of those choices push in opposite directions and largely explain the spread. NFER's broader FE definition sweeps in independent training provider staff at a £32,000 median, which pulls the FE side down and widens the gap relative to the IFS's college-only figure. The AoC's classroom-only school comparator pulls the school side down, which narrows the gap — and yet the AoC still produces the largest number, because its year mismatch pushes it back up. Fix the year mismatch and the AoC figure falls to roughly £11,500, which sits much closer to NFER's £10,434 than the headline £12,784 suggests.
£10,400 to £11,500
Where the two most recent, most like-for-like estimates converge once the AoC's year mismatch is corrected — NFER 2024/25 and AoC on a same-year basis
That convergence is, we think, the most useful thing on this page. The published headline figures range from £5,500 to £12,784 and look irreconcilable. Once you align the years and account for the population definitions, the two most recent estimates land within about a thousand pounds of each other. The £5,500 is not wrong; it is simply older and measures a narrower, better-paid FE population.
The sixth form college problem
This is the caveat we would put first if we were writing a headline, and it is the one almost every summary of this subject omits.
| Median FTE salary, teaching staff, 2024/25 | DfE workforce (14 May 2026) | DfE pension data (23 April 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Sixth form colleges | £49,700 | £48,800 |
| School-based providers | £49,700 | Not in scope |
| General FE colleges including tertiary | £37,600 | £38,800 |
| 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 |
On DfE's own provider-reported figures, sixth form college teaching staff and school-based provider teaching staff have the same median, to the pound. The gap between sixth form colleges and general FE colleges — £12,100 on that dataset, £10,000 on the pension-derived one — is as large as the gap the sector campaigns about.
The reason is the machinery. Sixth form colleges have their own National Joint Council pay spine, which ran from £33,465 to £51,714 from September 2025, and a national conditions handbook. General FE colleges have neither. Our sixth form college pay page sets out how that system works and why it produces such different outcomes.
What this means for how the headline figure should be read
There is a composition point underneath this too, and it is worth stating so the comparison is not read as pure injustice. Sixth form college teachers are overwhelmingly graduate subject specialists teaching Level 3 academic courses to a narrow age range — a job that resembles secondary teaching closely. General FE college teaching spans Levels 1 to 5, academic and vocational, sixteen-year-olds to adults, with a large proportion of staff who entered from industry rather than through graduate teacher training. Some of the pay difference reflects genuinely different jobs. Not all of it does, and the part that does not is what the sector is arguing about.
Real terms since 2010, and the three different 18%s
A second, separate question is not how FE pay compares with schools but how it compares with itself fifteen years ago. The best current answer is that median FE teacher pay fell by about 18% in real terms between 2010/11 and 2024/25, from NFER's 2026 report. NFER adds a useful comparator: average UK earnings rose by 4.4% in real terms over the same period, leaving a 22 percentage point gap between where median FE teacher earnings were in 2024/25 and where they would have been had they kept pace with average earnings.
Three published figures of 18%, meaning three different things
NFER, 2026 — a real-terms fall in actual pay. Median FE teacher pay fell about 18% in real terms between 2010/11 and 2024/25. This is the one to cite for "how much has FE pay fallen".
IFS report R254, March 2023 — a real-terms fall in recommended pay. The AoC's recommended pay declined by 18% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2022-23. That is the recommendation, not what was paid, and the IFS explicitly notes that because actual awards were often below the recommendation, the change in recommended pay levels "may actually understate the decline in pay experienced by college teachers".
IFS, October 2024 — not a fall at all. The 18% there is the size of the gap forecast for 2024/25, expressed as a percentage of school teacher pay. Nothing to do with real-terms change.
They coincide by accident. If you see "18%" quoted without a source, you cannot tell which one is meant.
NFER's own report contains a minor internal inconsistency worth flagging: its section heading, executive summary and press release say "almost 20 per cent" or "almost a fifth" since 2011, while its body text and chart say 18% since 2010/11. The body text and chart are the safer citation.
The union figure, and why it is double
The joint trade unions' 2026/27 pay claim states that pay in the sector has fallen in real terms by more than 40% since 2009/10, and that while a wage keeping pace with the cost of living would have risen by 88.6% since 2010, AoC recommendations have totalled a fraction of that. That is roughly double the IFS and NFER figures.
The reason is the deflator. The union figure is RPI-based and measured against recommendations; the IFS and NFER figures are CPIH-based and, in NFER's case, measured against actual median earnings. RPI has consistently run above CPI and CPIH, so an RPI-deflated series produces a much larger cumulative fall over fifteen years. Neither index is "the real one" — the same dispute drives the range of figures for school teachers, which we set out on our has teacher pay fallen since 2010 page. The practical point is simply to attribute the 40% as the unions' claim rather than as a neutral finding, and not to compare it directly with an IFS or NFER number.
The unions' claim also contains a cleaner comparison that avoids deflators entirely. FE spine point 30 was £28,599 in 2010-11 and had risen 27% by 2025-26; the school teachers' M6 point was £31,552 and had risen 44% over the same period — a seventeen percentage point divergence in nominal terms, with no index required.
How schools got here
A statutory pay document, an independent review body reporting annually, a ministerial decision, and additional government funding attached to the award in most recent years. The award applies to every maintained school automatically and to most academies by choice. The 2010s were still a period of substantial real-terms decline — the IFS puts the median school teacher salary as falling 15% between 2010/11 and 2023/24 — but the mechanism delivered the award uniformly once it was set.
How colleges got here
No statutory document, no review body, and a non-binding annual recommendation from an employers' body whose members' affordability is set by funding decisions they do not control. Eight consecutive years of a 1% or lower recommendation from 2014-15 to 2021-22, including one year of zero. And IFS evidence from 166 colleges that in three of those years, almost a third of colleges awarded nothing at all. The gap is not the product of a decision to pay college teachers less. It is the product of a structure that had no mechanism to stop it happening.
What the gap actually does
A pay gap is only interesting because of its consequences, and here the evidence is reasonably consistent even where the pay figures are not.
Retention
The most-quoted figures are the IFS's, from its 2023 report and repeated in its later work. Around 25% of college teachers leave the profession after one year, compared with 15% of school teachers. Three years in, almost half of college teachers have left, against around a quarter of school teachers. Ten years after beginning teaching, fewer than a quarter of college teachers remain, compared with over 60% of school teachers. On an annual basis the IFS puts the exit rate at 16% for college teachers against 10% for school teachers, 10 to 11% across most NHS occupations and 7 to 8% in the civil service.
Those figures are now a few years old, so it is worth noting that DfE's current data is broadly consistent: between 84.9% and 85.2% of teaching staff remained in the statutory further education sector from 2023/24 to 2024/25, which is an annual leaving rate of roughly 15%. NFER's report notes that the most recent DfE FE retention series it could find dates from 2017/18, when the leaving rate was 15.9%, and presses DfE to resume publishing it. If you see "one in six FE teachers leave every year", that is the 2017/18 number.
Vacancies
DfE's workforce statistics for 2024/25 record 3.5 teaching vacancies per 100 teaching positions at the end of the academic year, down from 3.9 the year before, against 1.9 per 100 for management and leadership posts. NFER's analysis of the preceding year found around four in every 100 FE teacher roles vacant, adding up to about 3,000 vacant roles, two-thirds of them in general FE colleges — and just one in 100 in sixth form colleges, which is the same pattern the pay data shows.
NFER also compares that with schools, and is careful about it: fewer than one in 100 secondary school classroom teacher roles were recorded as vacant in the 2023/24 School Workforce Census, which on a basic comparison suggests the FE vacancy rate is four times higher — but NFER warns explicitly that the two collections are not comparable, because schools count at a November snapshot and FE at year end. The direction is clear; the multiple is not.
- The shortages are concentrated in exactly the subjects where industry pays more. On NFER's 2023/24 figures the worst were Functional Skills IT at 9.2 vacancies per 100 roles, construction and related at 7.1, engineering and manufacturing at 6.9, agriculture and horticulture at 6.8, Functional Skills maths at 6.7 and physics at 6.7, against 3.9 for all subjects.
- Regionally it is worst where alternative employment is best. Engineering and manufacturing vacancies ran at 13.2% in London and 10.8% in Yorkshire and the Humber.
- Demand is rising at the same time. NFER projects the 16 to 18 population growing 7% between 2023 and 2027, requiring roughly 2,700 more FE teachers — close to half the size of the Government's 6,500 teacher recruitment target.
- Employers' own survey evidence puts pay first. In the AoC's September 2025 survey of 105 colleges, better pay was cited as a reason for teaching staff leaving by 72% of responding colleges, ahead of going back into industry at 54% and workload at 46%.
One AoC survey figure that is very easy to misread
And the pension, which nobody mentions
College lecturers and school teachers are in the same Teachers' Pension Scheme, on identical terms, with colleges participating by law and no ability to withdraw — as our page on FE lecturers and the TPS sets out. Because the scheme is career average, each year's accrual is a fraction of that year's pensionable earnings. A persistent pay gap therefore converts automatically into a pension gap, and it does so permanently: the years already accrued at the lower salary are banked at that level and no subsequent pay award repairs them. A lecturer £10,000 a year behind an equivalent school teacher across a twenty-year career loses the gross pay and a proportionate slice of retirement income on top.
Which number should you use?
We said we would not pick a winner, and we are not going to. But we can be useful about which figure answers which question.
- For the current gap, cite NFER's 20% for 2024/25, and give the underlying medians of £39,355 and £49,789 so the reader can see the population. It is the most recent published analysis, both sides use the same year and the same data source, and NFER shows its working. Note that its FE definition is broader than 'college lecturer'.
- For a cash figure, £10,434 is defensible as arithmetic on NFER's own medians — but say that it is calculated from NFER's figures rather than published by NFER.
- For the historical trajectory, use the IFS. Its 12% gap in 2010/11 and its finding that school pay fell 15% and college pay 17% between 2010/11 and 2023/24 is the clearest account of how the gap opened, and it is the only source that gives both sides on a consistent basis over the whole period.
- For real-terms decline, use NFER's 18% for 2010/11 to 2024/25, being explicit that it is CPIH-based and measures actual median pay. Attribute the unions' 40% separately as an RPI-based campaigning figure.
- Treat £12,500 as advocacy, not statistics. It comes from an unpublished letter, the AoC's own published calculation has a year mismatch that inflates it, and the AoC's chief executive described the gap as in excess of £10,000 in the same week.
- Always say which part of the sector you mean. If the answer is sixth form colleges, none of the headline figures apply and the honest answer is that the gap is close to zero.
Sources and accuracy
The IFS figures are from The state of college finances in England by Bruno Moura and Imran Tahir, published 24 October 2024, and from What has happened to college teacher pay in England? (IFS Report R254) by Luke Sibieta and Imran Tahir, published 30 March 2023, which is also the source for the retention comparisons. The NFER figures are from The Further Education Teacher Workforce in England Annual Report 2026 by Michael Scott, Lillian Flemons and Jack Worth, published 12 March 2026 and revised 26 March 2026, funded by the Nuffield Foundation; the separate 23% education-sector figure is from NFER's Building a stronger FE college workforce, commissioned by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and published September 2024. The AoC figures are from its evidence to the School Teachers' Review Body for the 36th report, submitted October 2025, and from FE Week's reporting of a joint AoC, UCU and UNISON letter in June and July 2026. Median salary by provider type is 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), which are also the sources for vacancy and retention rates. The union real-terms figures and the spine point comparison are from the joint trade unions' 2026/27 pay claim. The compliance evidence from 166 colleges is from IFS Report R254.
Several corrections are made explicitly in the text rather than silently: the £10,500 and 27% figures widely attributed to NFER are not NFER's, the AoC's £12,784 rests on a year mismatch, and three separate published figures of 18% mean three different things. We have flagged the sixth form college distinction throughout because omitting it makes the headline figure misleading for a large part of the sector, and we have not found official data on movement from further education into school teaching. The school-side methodology debate — CPI against RPI, scale points against median earnings — is deliberately not rehearsed here; it is set out in full on our has teacher pay fallen since 2010 page. This is independent guidance for orientation, not employment or financial advice, and it is not affiliated with the IFS, NFER, the Association of Colleges, the Department for Education or any trade union.
Frequently asked questions
How big is the pay gap between FE lecturers and school teachers? +
There is no single correct answer, and anyone who gives you one without naming a source and a year is over-simplifying. Three credible estimates are in circulation. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, in October 2024, put it at £5,500 or 15% for 2023/24 with a forecast of nearly £7,000 or 18% for 2024/25. The National Foundation for Educational Research, in March 2026, put it at 20% for 2024/25 — a median full-time FE teacher on £39,355 against £49,789 for a secondary school teacher, implying £10,434. The Association of Colleges, in its October 2025 evidence to the School Teachers' Review Body, calculated £12,784, and a figure of £12,500 was reported from a joint AoC, UCU and UNISON letter to the Education Secretary in June 2026. All three are defensible. They differ because they measure different populations in different years using different data.
Why do the three estimates disagree so much? +
Four things, and they compound. First, who counts as an FE teacher: the IFS uses DfE college workforce data for general FE colleges, while NFER uses ASHE occupational categories that sweep in independent training provider staff whose median is around £32,000, which widens the measured gap. Second, who counts as a school teacher: DfE's headline median covers all teachers regardless of grade, so it includes leadership, whereas the AoC compares against a classroom teacher median. Third, the year: the IFS figures describe 2023/24 with a forecast for 2024/25, NFER describes 2024/25, and the AoC's own calculation compares a 2024/25 school figure against a 2023/24 college figure. Fourth, whether you express the gap in cash or as a percentage, and of which base. None of that makes any of them wrong. It makes them answers to different questions.
Is the £10,500 figure an NFER number? +
No, and this is worth getting right because it is quoted very widely. NFER's own published figure is 20 per cent, and its chart gives median full-time earnings of £39,355 for FE teachers and £49,789 for secondary school teachers in 2024/25. The difference is £10,434, and 'nearly £10,500' is FE Week's arithmetic off NFER's chart rather than a figure NFER published. There is also a genuine error in circulation: FE Week's March 2026 report said FE staff earn 27 per cent less than their secondary school peers, which is not NFER's figure. £10,434 is 21% of the secondary salary and 26.5% of the FE salary, so the 27% appears to come from dividing by the FE figure while describing it as 'less than' the school figure. Use NFER's own 20 per cent.
Is the gap the same in sixth form colleges? +
No, and this is the largest and most commonly omitted caveat on the whole subject. The Department for Education's workforce statistics for 2024/25 give a median full-time equivalent teaching salary of £49,700 in sixth form colleges — identical to the figure for school-based providers, and above the £48,800 the parallel pension-data release gives. General further education colleges sit at £37,600 or £38,800 on the same two datasets. So the headline gap is essentially a general FE college phenomenon. The IFS is explicit that its own pay analysis covers roughly 50,000 teachers in general further education colleges and does not include sixth form colleges. Any content saying 'FE lecturers earn more than £10,000 less than school teachers' without that distinction is misleading for a substantial part of the sector.
Has FE pay really fallen 18% in real terms since 2010? +
Yes on the best current measure, but be careful, because three different published figures of 18% are in circulation and they mean three different things. NFER's 2026 report found that median FE teacher pay fell by about 18 per cent in real terms between 2010/11 and 2024/25 — that is the actual-pay version and the one to cite. The IFS's 2023 report found that AoC recommended pay fell 18% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2022-23 — that is recommended rather than actual pay, and the IFS notes it may understate the real decline because many colleges paid less than the recommendation. And the IFS's 2024 report describes an 18% figure that is not a fall at all: it is the size of the forecast 2024/25 gap expressed as a percentage of school teacher pay. They coincide numerically by accident.
How does that compare with school teachers' real-terms position? +
Worse, but not by as much as the raw numbers first suggest, because school teacher pay has also fallen substantially. The cleanest like-for-like comparison is the IFS's own: between 2010/11 and 2023/24, the median salary for school teachers fell by 15% while the median salary for college teachers fell by 17%. Both are large. The school side of that question has its own considerable methodological complexity — CPI versus RPI, scale points versus median earnings — which we work through separately on our page asking whether teacher pay has fallen since 2010. We are not going to repeat that discussion here. The short version for this page is that FE's real-terms position is comparable to schools' or somewhat worse, and the gap between the two has widened because FE started from a lower base and fell slightly further.
Why do the unions say 40%? +
Because they are using a different deflator and a different start year. The joint trade unions' 2026/27 pay claim states that pay in the sector has fallen in real terms by more than 40% since 2009/10, and notes that a wage keeping pace with the cost of living would have risen by 88.6% since 2010 against a much smaller total of AoC recommendations. That is RPI-based framing measured against recommendations rather than CPIH-based analysis of actual median earnings, and it produces roughly double the IFS and NFER figures. It is not dishonest — RPI is a published index and the underlying divergence is real — but it is a campaigning figure and should be attributed as the unions' claim rather than presented as a neutral finding.
Do FE lecturers leave the profession faster than school teachers? +
On the available evidence, substantially faster, though the best figures are now a few years old. The IFS found that around 25% of college teachers leave after one year against 15% of school teachers; that almost half have left three years in, against around a quarter of school teachers; and that fewer than a quarter remain after ten years against over 60% of school teachers. It put the annual exit rate at 16% for college teachers against 10% for school teachers, 10 to 11% across most NHS occupations and 7 to 8% in the civil service. More recent DfE data gives an annual retention rate of between 84.9% and 85.2% for teaching staff in the statutory FE sector between 2023/24 and 2024/25 — an annual leaving rate of roughly 15%, which is broadly consistent.
Is the gap getting bigger or smaller? +
It widened consistently from 2010 and may now be stabilising, but it is genuinely too early to say. NFER's data shows the gap growing from around 10% between 2010/11 and 2019/20 to 20% in 2024/25. Since then two things have happened that cut the other way: the AoC recommended 4% for 2025/26, matching the schools award exactly, and the Government announced £485 million over two years on 1 July 2026 explicitly to help colleges match the school teacher pay rise. Whether that closes anything depends on the 2026/27 recommendation, which had not been published when we wrote this, and on how many colleges actually pay it. The AoC's own position on the 4% for 2025/26 was that for colleges able to reach it, the award would barely maintain the gap rather than close it.
Does the pay gap affect my pension too? +
Yes, automatically and permanently, and it is a dimension of the problem that rarely gets discussed. College lecturers and school teachers are in the same Teachers' Pension Scheme on identical terms — colleges participate by law with no opt-out. In the career average scheme each year's accrual is a fraction of that year's pensionable earnings, so a persistent pay gap compounds directly into a pension gap. A lecturer earning £10,000 a year less than an equivalent school teacher over a twenty-year career does not only lose £200,000 of gross pay; they also accrue a smaller pension on every one of those years, and no later pay award repairs the years already banked.
Related guides
FE Lecturer Pay Explained
The structural reason the gap exists — no STPCD, no review body, and a recommendation almost a third of colleges have ignored.
Has Teacher Pay Fallen Since 2010?
The school-side equivalent of this page — 1%, 10%, 14% or 23%, and why the deflator choice drives everything.
Sixth Form College Teacher Pay Explained
The part of the post-16 sector where the gap is close to zero, and the national machinery that explains why.
FE Lecturers and the Teachers' Pension Scheme
Why a career average pay gap becomes a permanent pension gap, in a scheme both sectors share identically.
The FE Targeted Retention Incentive
The DfE's answer to the retention half of the problem — and what its own evaluation says about whether it works.
QTLS vs QTS: Teaching in Schools
The route across the gap, if you decide the answer is to move rather than to campaign.
Teacher Pay Scales 2026/27
The confirmed STPCD ranges on the school side of every comparison on this page.