The Academy Pay Floor: Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026

This is the most consequential change to the legal structure of teacher pay in England since the academies programme began, and it is the kind of change that quietly invalidates a lot of existing advice. Pages across this site — including our own — have for years explained academy pay by starting from the premise that trusts sit outside the national framework and can do as they like. That premise is now being dismantled, in stages, and this page exists to set out exactly what has changed, what has not, and what is still waiting on secondary legislation.

It is also a change that is easy to describe inaccurately in either direction. Read one summary and you would think academies were bound to the STPCD from June 2026; read another and you would think nothing happens until 2027. The truth is more precise than either, and the precision is genuinely useful if you are negotiating a pay policy, weighing up a job offer, or trying to work out what your trust can and cannot do next September.

What academies could do before this Act

The starting point is worth stating plainly, because it was a genuinely unusual arrangement by international standards and it had been in place long enough to feel normal.

The STPCD is made under Part 8 of the Education Act 2002. It applied to local authority maintained schools, and it is a statutory document with real legal force: a maintained school must pay within the specified ranges, must observe the conditions of service provisions, and must apply the annual award. Academies were outside it entirely. Their pay and conditions were a matter for the trust, constrained only by the trust's funding agreement, general employment law, whatever TUPE-protected terms transferred staff had brought with them, and the labour market.

In practice that freedom was exercised much less dramatically than the theory allowed. Most trusts mirrored the STPCD closely — partly because their staff had transferred on STPCD terms and it was administratively simpler to keep one system, partly because a teacher shortage is not the environment in which to advertise below the national rate. A Tes survey of trusts published in June 2024, which received 624 replies, identified only 12 trusts paying above the national scale at all, with the top of the range at around 5.6% above and most of the others clustered between 1% and 2.5%. The default across the sector was simply to match.

But the freedom was real where trusts chose to use it, and it ran in both directions:

• Pay levels. A trust could set its own pay ranges, above or below the national ones, or invent a structure that did not map onto the STPCD ranges at all.
• The annual award. A trust was under no obligation to pass on the national pay award in any given year, and declining to do so breached nothing.
• Progression. The criteria, the evidence, the process and the decision-maker for pay progression were all matters for the trust's own pay policy.
• Allowances. TLR structures, SEN allowances and recruitment and retention payments could be restructured, renamed or replaced with trust-designed alternatives.
• Conditions of service. This is where the divergence was greatest in practice. The 1,265-hour limit on directed time across 195 days, the guaranteed 10% planning, preparation and assessment time, the limits on cover and on administrative tasks, and the rarely-cover provisions are STPCD conditions — and a trust outside the STPCD was not bound by any of them for staff it recruited itself.
• Qualifications. Academies could employ teachers without qualified teacher status, a freedom introduced in 2012 and used to widely varying degrees across the sector.

The conditions point is the one that mattered most to the people actually working under these arrangements. A higher headline salary attached to a substantially longer contracted day is not straightforwardly a better deal, and our profile of Ark Schools' pay arrangements works through a concrete example of that trade-off in detail.

What the Act actually does

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 (c. 21) received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. Part 2 of the Act deals with schools. The pay provision is section 59, which is short — it does its work by introducing Schedule 3, which amends Part 8 of the Education Act 2002 in relation to the pay and conditions of teachers at academies other than 16 to 19 academies.

Schedule 3 does four distinct things, and keeping them apart is the key to understanding the whole package.

The government's own description of the objective, in its published policy summary notes, is to "create a floor with no ceiling by providing a core pay offer for teachers in state schools and enabling innovation to help all schools to attract the top teaching talent they need." The minimum is to be set at the same level as applies to maintained schools through the STPCD, each time the STPCD is updated — so the floor moves with the national award rather than being fixed at a point in time.

The commencement timetable

This is where most summaries go wrong, and where getting it right actually matters if you are dealing with a trust right now.

Commencement is governed by section 78 of the Act. Section 59 and Schedule 3 — except paragraph 6 of Schedule 3 — came into force two months after Royal Assent, which is 29 June 2026. Paragraph 6, which is the limb inserting the duty to have regard to the conditions provisions of an order under section 122, is specifically carved out and commences on a day the Secretary of State appoints by regulations. Section 53, the QTS and induction provision, is also left to commencement regulations.

The mechanism the government has described for making the order is that the Secretary of State remits the School Teachers' Review Body to consider the minimum level of remuneration for academy teachers, and the resulting minimum is set at the same level as applies to maintained schools through the STPCD. In practice that is expected to mean the next version of the STPCD carries the academy minimum alongside the maintained school ranges, rather than a wholly separate document being produced.

The have-regard duty is being deliberately held back for a stated reason: the government wants to remit the STRB to recommend changes to the STPCD, consult on those changes and update the document before academies are required to have regard to it — so that trusts know exactly what framework they are being asked to have regard to. That is a reasonable piece of sequencing and it means the conditions side of this story will not resolve until at least one further STPCD cycle has run.

A floor, not a ceiling

The most common anxiety when the Bill was published was the opposite of the one you might expect. It was not that academies would be forced to pay more; it was that trusts already paying above the national scale would be required to bring salaries back down to STPCD maxima, forcing them to unwind existing contracts.

That concern was addressed directly during the Bill's passage. A government amendment was tabled to put beyond doubt that only a minimum pay band is being set, with no ceiling, and the Secretary of State's position was that all schools will have full flexibility to innovate with a floor and no ceiling on what that means. The Department for Education's published notes answer the question about pay cuts bluntly, stating that no teacher will receive a pay cut as a result of the measure and that there will be no ceiling on pay for any state school.

There is a second half of the policy that gets less attention and is arguably more interesting. The Department for Education has said it intends to use existing powers to reform the STPCD so as to remove the maximum of the pay bands for maintained schools and provide additional flexibilities. In other words, the intended end state is not academies being pulled down to maintained school constraints, but both sectors ending up with a common minimum and comparable freedom above it. Whether that materialises as described is a question for future STPCD cycles, but it is the stated direction and it reframes what the Act is for.

Who is in scope, and who isn't

Scope is defined with more care than the headlines suggest, and the exclusions are not incidental.

The framework defines an "academy teacher" through three cases. The first covers a person employed under a contract by the proprietor of an academy to provide primary or secondary education, carrying out work specified in regulations, and not excluded by regulations. The second covers academy principals who have not been appointed as executive leaders by the proprietor. The third covers a person who would meet the definition of a school teacher except that the employer is an academy proprietor rather than a local authority or governing body.

• In scope: teachers in academy schools providing primary or secondary education.
• In scope: teachers in alternative provision academies.
• In scope: principals and headteachers of individual academies, where they are not also appointed as executive leaders of the trust.
• In scope: city technology colleges, which the new section 127A confirms are treated as academies for these purposes.

• Excluded: executive leaders appointed by an academy proprietor — chief executives and trust-level leaders whose role is running the trust rather than teaching. This is the exclusion that keeps the much-discussed question of MAT chief executive pay outside the framework entirely.
• Excluded: teachers at 16 to 19 academies, to the extent they teach there. Section 59 applies to academies "other than 16 to 19 Academies", and section 127A carries that exclusion through the amended provisions.
• Excluded, by intended use of the regulation-making power: support staff, whose pay and conditions are intended to be dealt with through the School Support Staff Negotiating Body once it is established under the Employment Rights Act 2025.

The support staff exclusion is worth understanding rather than resenting. It is not a gap; it is a division of labour between two separate reform programmes. Teaching assistants, cover supervisors, technicians and school business professionals are intended to get their own national negotiating machinery through the SSSNB rather than being folded into a document designed for teachers. Our cover supervisor pay guide covers the SSSNB timetable and what it is expected to deliver.

The other thing worth noting is geographic scope. This is England-only legislation applying to an England-only school structure. Teacher pay is devolved: Wales has operated its own pay review body and statutory pay document since 2018, and Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own machinery. Our Wales pay scales page, Scotland page and Northern Ireland page cover those separately.

The 'have regard' duty, and conditions of service

The pay floor is the headline, but the have-regard duty is the provision with the longer reach — and the conditions limb of it is, for a lot of academy teachers, the part that would actually change their working life.

"Have regard to" is a familiar formulation in English public law and it is weaker than "must comply with" and considerably stronger than "may consider". The Department for Education's gloss is the operative one here: it means trusts must follow the STPCD unless they have a good reason not to, with the example given being a change that would benefit both teachers and pupils. A trust departing from the STPCD will, in effect, need to be able to articulate and defend its reason, which is a meaningfully different position from having no obligation to explain itself at all.

The duty extends to the whole of the STPCD, not merely its pay ranges. That matters because the STPCD's conditions of service provisions are the parts academies have diverged from most:

• Directed time. The limit of 1,265 hours of directed time across 195 days in a year is the single hardest workload protection teachers in maintained schools have, and the provision academies most commonly do without.
• PPA time. A guaranteed allocation of planning, preparation and assessment time equivalent to at least 10% of timetabled teaching.
• Cover. Provisions limiting the routine use of qualified teachers to cover for absent colleagues.
• Administrative and clerical tasks. The list of routine tasks teachers should not routinely be required to perform.
• Examination invigilation. Provisions that teachers should not routinely be required to invigilate external examinations.
• Pay safeguarding. The rules protecting pay for a defined period where a post or allowance is lost through restructuring.

What stays discretionary

Against all of the above, it is worth being equally clear about what a trust will still decide for itself even once every provision is fully in force. A floor is a floor.

For orientation, the national ranges the floor will be referenced to for 2026/27 run from £34,069 at M1 to £46,940 at M6 on the Main Pay Range outside London, £49,134 to £52,835 on the Upper Pay Range, and from £23,732 at the bottom of the Unqualified Teacher range. The full tables, including the London and fringe bands, are on our 2026/27 teacher pay scales page.

Academies join the national pay round

A quieter provision with real long-term significance: bodies representing the interests of academy proprietors have been added to the statutory consultee lists in sections 121 and 126 of the Education Act 2002, which govern who the School Teachers' Review Body and the Secretary of State must consult during the pay review process.

This corrects an oddity that had become increasingly hard to defend. The majority of secondary schools in England are academies, and a large and growing share of primaries. The STRB was making annual recommendations on a national pay framework while the employers of a very large proportion of the workforce had no formal standing in the process. From 29 June 2026, trust representative bodies are inside the tent.

Two consequences are worth anticipating. First, it makes the STPCD more legitimate as a genuinely national document, which in turn makes the have-regard duty easier to defend politically — it is much harder to argue you should not have to follow a framework your sector helped shape. Second, it changes the composition of the evidence the STRB receives, adding employer perspectives that have historically reached it only indirectly. Whether that pushes recommendations up or down is not obvious, and anyone confidently predicting either is guessing.

For context on the current round, the STRB's 36th Report recommended and the government accepted on 1 July 2026 a 3.5% uplift to all pay and allowance ranges and advisory points from 1 September 2026, with 5% on the minimum of the unqualified teacher range outside London, and a further 3% from 1 September 2027. Our STRB tracker follows the process as it runs.

QTS in academies from September 2027

Running alongside the pay measures is a separate change that ends another long-standing academy freedom. Section 53 of the Act amends section 133 of the Education Act 2002 — the provision that requires "specified work" to be carried out by qualified teachers — so that the definition of school includes academies of a description specified by the Secretary of State in regulations. It makes a parallel amendment to section 135A to extend the statutory induction requirement to early career teachers in those academies.

Since 2012, academies have been able to employ teachers without QTS. The extent to which they did varied enormously — many trusts never used the freedom at all, and some used it substantially, particularly in shortage subjects and in specialist roles. From the implementation date, specified primary and secondary academy settings will be subject to the same requirement that applies to maintained schools and to special schools not so maintained, subject to the existing exemptions in the Education (Specified Work) (England) Regulations 2012.

Three practical points matter here:

• It is not retrospective. The QTS requirement applies only to teachers employed after the implementation date. Unqualified teachers already in post in academies are not affected, and the statutory induction requirement applies only to those who gain QTS after the relevant date.
• The date is set by regulations, not by the Act. It was originally anticipated as 1 September 2026 and is now widely reported as taking effect on 1 September 2027, to give schools time to prepare. The Department for Education has said it will update the associated regulations and publish full guidance in the autumn term of 2026.
• Enforcement has a route. Section 58 of the Act, in force since 29 June 2026, gives the Secretary of State power to direct an academy trust that is in breach of a duty in its funding agreement — a mechanism commentary has identified as available to secure compliance with the QTS requirements where funding agreements require trusts to comply with applicable legislation.

If you teach without QTS in an academy and are wondering what this means for you personally: nothing immediately, because the requirement is not retrospective — but it does change the strategic picture for anyone intending to move schools after the implementation date. The assessment-only route to QTS is the obvious option for someone already doing the full job, and our becoming a teacher hub compares the routes. The unqualified teacher range starts at £23,732 nationally for 2026/27, against £34,069 at M1 for a qualified teacher, so the financial case for qualifying was already substantial before this change.

What it means if you work in a trust

Separating out what actually changes for individuals, in rough order of how soon it matters:

Three concrete things worth doing:

• Ask for your trust's current pay policy and check its review date. Policies are being rewritten across the sector in response to this legislation, and the version on the website may predate the Act.
• If you are being recruited, ask whether the contract carries the 1,265-hour directed time limit. This remains the single most useful question to ask a trust, and it is the point on which the legislation is least settled.
• Check where your own pay point sits against the national ranges. If you are anywhere near a national minimum, the order, once made, will be directly relevant to you. If you are well above it, the floor is reassurance rather than a change.

Our academy trust pay overview and individual trust profiles go into how specific trusts have approached pay, and our take-home pay calculator will model what any specific figure is worth after tax, National Insurance and pension.

What is still uncertain

This is recent legislation with a substantial amount left to secondary legislation, and it would be dishonest to present the picture as more settled than it is. The following are genuinely open as at the date on this page.

• When the minimum remuneration order will actually be made, and exactly how it will be expressed. The expected route is via the STPCD, but the order had not been made at the time of writing and the draft STPCD 2026 consultation had not closed.
• When paragraph 6 of Schedule 3 will be commenced, bringing the conditions side of the have-regard duty into force. "No sooner than September 2026" is a floor, not a date.
• What "good reason" will mean in practice. The DfE's example — a change benefiting both teachers and pupils — is illustrative rather than exhaustive, and the standard has not been tested. How much latitude a trust with a longer contracted day will have under this heading is the single biggest unresolved question in the package.
• What the promised STPCD reforms will contain. The government has said it will use existing powers to remove the maximum of pay bands for maintained schools and introduce further flexibilities, and has said it will remit the STRB to consider them. The detail is not yet public.
• Which academies will be specified in the QTS regulations, and confirmation of the 1 September 2027 date, which is reported rather than formally commenced.
• Precisely which staff will be excluded by regulations under the exclusion power, and how that interacts with the SSSNB's eventual scope.

Sources and accuracy

The legislative analysis on this page is taken from the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 (c. 21) as enacted: section 59 and Schedule 3 (pay and conditions of academy teachers, amending Part 8 of the Education Act 2002, including the new section 122A minimum remuneration power, the amendments to sections 121 and 126 adding bodies representing academy proprietors as consultees, and the new section 127A on the meaning of "Academy"); section 53 (school teachers' qualifications and induction, amending sections 133 and 135A of the Education Act 2002); section 58 (power to secure performance of a proprietor's duties); and section 78 (commencement), which brings section 59 and Schedule 3 into force two months after Royal Assent except for paragraph 6 of Schedule 3, and leaves sections 53 and 54 to commencement regulations. Royal Assent was on 29 April 2026.

Policy intent, the "floor with no ceiling" framing, the gloss on what "have regard" means, the confirmation that no teacher will receive a pay cut, and the statements that the minimum remuneration requirement will apply no earlier than September 2026 and the have-regard duty commence no sooner than September 2026, are from the Department for Education's published Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act policy summary notes (June 2026). Commencement dates and the reported 1 September 2027 date for the QTS and induction changes are corroborated by education law commentary from Stone King, Browne Jacobson and Ward Hadaway published following Royal Assent, and by Schools Week's legal analysis of the pay and conditions changes.

Pay figures are the confirmed 2026/27 STPCD figures effective from 1 September 2026, following the Government's acceptance of the STRB's 36th Report on 1 July 2026 — a 3.5% uplift on all pay and allowance ranges and advisory points, with 5% on the minimum of the unqualified teacher range outside London, and a further 3% from 1 September 2027. The statutory consultation on the draft STPCD 2026 runs to 23 September 2026. The observation that only 12 trusts were identified as paying above the national scale is from the Tes MAT pay survey published in June 2024, which received 624 replies.

This page is independent guidance for orientation, not legal, employment or financial advice, and is not affiliated with the DfE, the STRB, any academy trust or any trade union. This is recent legislation with substantial provisions still awaiting secondary legislation, and the position will move. For a decision that matters — a contract, a pay appeal, a policy negotiation — check the current legislation and your trust's own pay policy, and take union advice.