Academy Conversion and Your Teachers' Pension (TPS)

"What happens to my pension?" is, by some distance, the most anxious question staff ask when a conversion is announced, and it deserves a better answer than the reassuring vagueness it usually gets. The reassurance happens to be correct in this case, but "don't worry about it" is not an explanation, and teachers who have watched colleagues in the independent sector lose TPS access have an entirely reasonable basis for wanting to know why the state sector is different.

This guide sets out the actual legal mechanism, what it does and does not cover, and the one genuine pension risk that sometimes travels alongside conversion without being part of it. If you are more concerned about pay and conditions than pension, our companion guide on what happens to your pay when your school converts covers that side in full.

The short legal answer

The Teachers' Pension Scheme is established by regulations made under the Public Service Pensions Act 2013 — the current set being the Teachers' Pension Scheme Regulations 2014. Schedule 1 of those regulations defines what counts as pensionable employment, and it does so by listing categories of employment rather than by listing approved employers who have signed up.

Among those categories is employment as a teacher in an Academy, a city technology college or a city college for the technology of the arts, and employment as a teacher by a multi-academy trust. Employment in those settings is pensionable without election — meaning it is pensionable automatically, by virtue of what the job is and where it is, rather than because any employer chose to make it so.

That is the whole mechanism, and its consequences are worth spelling out because each one closes off a worry people genuinely have:

• The trust cannot decline to participate. Participation is not a decision an academy trust makes. It is a legal consequence of employing teachers in an academy.
• The trust cannot leave. There is no withdrawal mechanism available to an academy trust, because there was no joining mechanism in the first place.
• The trust cannot offer an alternative in place of the TPS. A defined contribution scheme, a salary uplift in exchange for leaving the scheme, or any other substitute is not available to a trust for its teaching staff.
• New teachers recruited after conversion are in exactly the same position. This is not a protection that applies only to transferring staff. It attaches to the employment, not to the person.
• The benefits are identical. Accrual at 1/57 of pensionable pay a year, revaluation at CPI plus 1.6% while in service, the same Normal Pension Age, the same contribution tiers, the same death and ill-health provisions. None of these vary by employer type.

It is also worth noting what does not do the work here. TUPE does not protect your pension. Regulation 10 of the TUPE Regulations 2006 specifically excludes old-age, invalidity and survivors' benefits under an occupational pension scheme from the terms that transfer. In a private sector business sale, that exclusion is a serious gap and a great deal of contractual drafting goes into filling it. In a school conversion it simply does not matter, because the gap is filled by dedicated pensions legislation instead. People who have read about the TUPE pensions exclusion and become alarmed are reading accurately and drawing the wrong conclusion for this context.

Why academies are not independent schools

The reason this question generates so much anxiety is that teachers have watched a real and large-scale loss of TPS access happen elsewhere in the profession over the last several years. It is worth understanding exactly why that happened and why the same thing structurally cannot happen in an academy.

Independent schools participate in the TPS as accepted schools. That is a completely different legal status. An accepted school applies to participate, is accepted, and participates under an arrangement it entered into voluntarily — which means it can also leave. When the employer contribution rate rose from 16.48% to 23.68% in September 2019 following the 2016 valuation, that voluntary participation started to look expensive, and independent schools began withdrawing in numbers. The government subsequently consulted on and introduced a "phased withdrawal" option, implemented from September 2021, which lets an independent school close the scheme to new staff while keeping existing members in it. Reporting suggests roughly 200 independent schools — around a fifth of those participating — have withdrawn since 2019.

The practical takeaway is narrow but useful: "will I keep the Teachers' Pension?" is a question worth asking carefully if you are considering a move to an independent school, a sixth form college, an international school or certain non-school employers. It is not a question worth asking about an academy, a multi-academy trust, a free school or a city technology college, because the answer is fixed by regulation and does not vary between employers.

What happens to your record on conversion day

Mechanically, a handover does take place — it is just an administrative one that happens around you rather than to you. It is worth knowing what it involves, because knowing what should happen is what lets you spot the rare occasion when it hasn't.

Accrued benefits and the final salary link

Your accrued benefits are not affected by conversion in any way. They are a liability of the scheme, backed by government, not an asset held by your employer. Changing employer within the scheme has no more effect on them than changing schools does.

The provision that makes people nervous, and the one most worth understanding properly, is the final salary link. It matters to anyone who was in the TPS before the move to career average. Benefits built up in the 1995 and 2007 final salary sections are calculated on your salary at the point you leave pensionable service, not on your salary when you moved into the career average scheme. For a teacher who joined in, say, 2005 and retires in 2040, the difference between those two figures over thirty-five years is enormous, which is why the link is one of the most valuable features of the scheme for longer-serving members.

The link is broken by one thing and one thing only: a continuous break in pensionable service of more than five years. Where that happens, the final salary benefits are calculated using salaries as at the date of the break instead of at retirement, and the value lost can be very substantial.

Academy conversion creates no break of any length. The day before conversion is a day of pensionable service in the TPS; the day after conversion is a day of pensionable service in the TPS. There is no gap for the five-year rule to measure. This is not a case of the break being short enough to be safe — there is no break at all.

The same reasoning disposes of a related worry. Some teachers ask whether conversion means their final salary benefits will be calculated on their salary at the conversion date and then frozen. It does not. The calculation still uses your best pensionable salary in accordance with the scheme rules at the point you actually leave pensionable service — typically the better of your last twelve months or the best three consecutive revalued years in your last ten. Our guide to the 2015 career average scheme goes through how the two sets of benefits interact in detail.

The five-year break rule, and why it doesn't bite

Since the five-year rule is the thing genuinely worth protecting, it is worth knowing when it is in play, if only so you can recognise that conversion is not one of those occasions.

The rule is about pensionable service, not about employment. What creates a break is a period during which you are not in pensionable employment in the TPS — leaving teaching, taking an extended career break, moving to an employer outside the scheme, or opting out of the scheme while continuing to teach. Teachers' Pensions guidance is that a member with final salary link protection who leaves and returns within five years retains the link; a member who returns after more than five years loses it, unless they can show continuous pensionable public service elsewhere in the UK without a break of more than five years in the meantime.

• Does not create a break: your school converting to academy status, your school joining a MAT, your school moving from one MAT to another, moving voluntarily between schools with no gap, or a change of payroll provider.
• Does create a break: opting out of the TPS while continuing to teach, a career break or unpaid leave beyond the scheme's limits, moving to an employer that is not a TPS participating employer, moving abroad, or leaving teaching entirely.
• Needs checking case by case: supply work through an agency, where TPS access depends on the specific arrangement and is frequently absent; and independent sector posts, where it depends on the individual school's participation status.

Contributions after conversion

Neither your contributions nor your employer's change because of conversion, because neither is set by the employer.

Your own contribution is determined by six salary-banded tiers that apply across the whole scheme. For 2026/27, following an uprating of the thresholds by 3.8% in line with CPI from 1 April 2026, they run from 7.4% for salaries up to £36,198.99 through to 12% for salaries of £104,414.00 and above. The bands are applied to your entire salary rather than marginally, which is why crossing a threshold can cost more than the pay rise that took you over it. None of this varies by employer type: a teacher on the same salary pays the same percentage in a maintained school and an academy.

The employer contribution is set nationally after each scheme valuation and is also identical across employer types. It has been 28.68% of pensionable pay, including the 0.08% administration levy, since April 2024, following the 2020 valuation. Teachers' Pensions has confirmed that the 2024 valuation reduces the rate to 17.68% from 1 April 2027.

That reduction is a large institutional change and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not mean for you. It does not change your benefits at all: TPS benefits are defined by regulation — accrual rate, revaluation, Normal Pension Age, survivor provisions — and are not a function of what employers happen to be paying in during any given period. What it changes is school and trust budgets, and it removes a substantial cost pressure that academies and maintained schools alike have been carrying since 2019. It is also, in passing, the reason the independent sector withdrawal story has the shape it does: the rate that made voluntary participation look unaffordable is now coming down significantly, though for schools that have already withdrawn that arrives rather late.

One genuinely academy-specific point on contributions: because pension accrual is built from pensionable pay, a trust's pay decisions feed directly into your pension even though the scheme rules do not vary. A trust that pays above the national scale builds you a slightly larger pension every year; a trust that declines to pass on a national pay award builds you a slightly smaller one, permanently, because each year's accrual is locked in at that year's pay. This is the mechanism through which academy pay freedom actually touched pensions — indirectly, through salary, rather than through scheme access.

Support staff and the LGPS

The protection for support staff works by the same statutory technique, in a different set of regulations.

Schedule 2 Part 1 of the Local Government Pension Scheme Regulations 2013 lists, as a scheme employer, the proprietor of an Academy within the meaning of section 579 of the Education Act 1996 who has entered into Academy arrangements under section 1 of the Academies Act 2010. Bodies in Schedule 2 Part 1 are known as scheduled bodies: they have an automatic right to participate in the LGPS and a corresponding obligation to offer membership to every eligible employee.

So on conversion, teaching assistants, cover supervisors, HLTAs, technicians, administrative staff, catering staff and site staff continue in the LGPS without a break and with accrued benefits intact. The trust joins the same administering authority fund the school was already in, becoming a separate employer within that fund. That last detail has one practical consequence worth knowing: the trust gets its own employer contribution rate, set by the fund actuary at the next triennial valuation, which may differ from the rate the local authority was paying. That affects the trust's budget, not your benefits — LGPS benefits are defined by regulation in the same way TPS benefits are.

Our cover supervisor pay guide covers the LGPS side in more depth for anyone in a support staff role trying to compare the two schemes properly, including why the LGPS's more generous 1/49 accrual rate and the TPS's stronger CPI-plus-1.6% revaluation are not trivially rankable against each other.

Where the real pension risk actually lives

Everything above is genuinely reassuring, and it would be dishonest to leave it there without naming the one scenario in which a school-related transfer really can put a pension at risk. It is not conversion. It is outsourcing, and it affects support staff rather than teachers.

When a trust outsources a service — catering, cleaning, facilities management, IT support, sometimes whole business-support functions — to a commercial provider, that is a service provision change and a second, separate TUPE transfer. The receiving employer is a company, not a scheduled body, so nothing in the LGPS Regulations puts it automatically inside the scheme. Continued LGPS access for the transferring staff then depends on the contractor being granted admitted body status by the administering authority, on a properly drafted admission agreement, and on the pension protections negotiated into the outsourcing contract. Public sector pension protection policy is designed to deliver this, but it is a set of obligations to be complied with rather than a statutory fact, and the quality of implementation varies.

A trust-owned service company — a wholly owned subsidiary set up to deliver services across a MAT — sits in an interesting middle position and is increasingly common. Staff transferring into one are transferring to a separate legal entity that is not itself an academy proprietor, so the automatic scheduled body status does not straightforwardly follow. Arrangements differ, and this is a question to put in writing rather than assume. Our TUPE guide for teachers works through service provision changes and the admitted body mechanism in more detail.

McCloud, MAT moves and other edge cases

A few situations come up often enough to deserve specific answers.

Does conversion affect my McCloud remedy position? No. The remedy for the age discrimination identified in the McCloud and Sargeant litigation rolled affected members back into their legacy scheme for the remedy period of 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2022 and gives them a choice of benefits for that period at the point of retirement. It is a scheme-level remedy attached to your membership, entirely independent of who your employer was or is. A conversion in 2026 does not touch it. Our McCloud remedy guide covers how the choice actually works.

What if my school moves between trusts a second time? Nothing changes. Each move is a TUPE transfer between two employers who are both statutory TPS participating employers, so service remains continuous each time. A teacher whose school has converted, been rebrokered and merged three times over a decade has one continuous TPS record listing several employers.

What about additional pension, faster accrual or buy-out arrangements I've already bought? These are contracts with the scheme, not with your employer, and they continue unaffected. What does sometimes go wrong is the payroll instruction: an additional contribution being deducted by the old payroll can fail to be set up by the new one. Check the first two or three academy payslips specifically for this.

What if I'm on maternity leave, sick leave or a career break at the conversion date? You transfer like anyone else — TUPE covers employees who are absent but still employed — and your pension position follows the normal scheme rules for whatever kind of absence you are on. Our teacher maternity pay and pension guide covers how pensionable pay works during maternity leave, which is the more common source of confusion here.

What if I'm part-time? No difference in principle. Your pensionable pay is your actual pro-rated salary, your contribution tier is set against that actual pay rather than a full-time-equivalent figure, and both of those continue unchanged through conversion. Our part-time and job share guide covers the interaction in depth.

Checks for your first academy payslip

Since administrative error is the only realistic pension risk conversion creates, it is worth spending ten minutes on these checks in the first term rather than discovering a problem at retirement.

• Is a TPS deduction being taken at all? The single most consequential payroll failure at conversion is a member being missed off the new employer's submission. If there is no pension line on your payslip, raise it immediately.
• Is the deduction at the right tier? Check the percentage against your annual salary and the 2026/27 bands. A wrong tier is usually a wrong salary figure in the new payroll system, which may also be affecting other things.
• Is your continuous service date right? It should be your original start date, not the conversion date. This matters for employment rights as much as for pension, and it is the most common single error.
• Are any additional contributions still running? Additional pension purchase, faster accrual and buy-out instructions have to be re-established by the new payroll and sometimes are not.
• Check your service record online in the term after conversion. Log in to My Pension Online and confirm continuous service across the transfer date, no gap, no duplicate employment record, and the correct salary figures.
• Check your next annual benefit statement against the previous one. The year covering conversion is the one to read carefully — the figures should show ordinary year-on-year progression with nothing unusual around the transfer date.
• Keep your final maintained-school payslip and your first academy payslip. If a discrepancy surfaces later, these two documents settle the question quickly.

If something is wrong, raise it with the trust's payroll or HR team first, because almost all of these are payroll data issues rather than Teachers' Pensions issues and are fixed at source. If that does not resolve it, Teachers' Pensions can be contacted directly, and your union can escalate. Errors caught in the same financial year are routine to correct; errors caught a decade later require reconstructing records that may no longer exist.

Sources and accuracy

The statutory position on academy participation in the Teachers' Pension Scheme is taken from Schedule 1 of the Teachers' Pension Scheme Regulations 2014 (SI 2014/512), which lists teaching in an Academy, city technology college, city college for the technology of the arts, 16 to 19 Academy and multi-academy trust as pensionable employment without election, and which separately provides for "accepted schools" — the category independent schools participate under. The support staff position is from Schedule 2 Part 1 of the Local Government Pension Scheme Regulations 2013, which lists academy proprietors as scheduled bodies.

Contribution figures are from Teachers' Pensions: six member contribution tiers for 2026/27 running from 7.4% to 12%, with thresholds uprated by 3.8% from 1 April 2026; an employer contribution rate of 28.68% including the 0.08% administration levy, in force since April 2024 following the 2020 valuation; and a reduction to 17.68% from 1 April 2027 following the 2024 valuation, as announced by Teachers' Pensions in June 2026. Final salary link and break in service rules follow Teachers' Pensions published member guidance. The independent sector context reflects the increase in the employer rate from 16.48% to 23.68% in September 2019 following the 2016 valuation, and the phased withdrawal arrangements introduced following the Department for Education's 2020 consultation and available from September 2021.

TUPE points reflect the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006, in particular regulation 10 on occupational pension schemes. The reference to 16 to 19 academies being excluded from the new academy pay provisions reflects section 59 of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026.

This page is independent guidance for orientation, not financial, pensions, tax or legal advice, and is not affiliated with the DfE, Teachers' Pensions, any local authority, any academy trust or any trade union. Pension regulations change, and the position for any individual can depend on service history, scheme section and prior breaks. For a decision that matters, check your own record with Teachers' Pensions, take union advice, and for anything involving transfers, opt-outs or retirement timing consider regulated financial advice.