The DfE RM6376 Supply Teacher Framework Explained

There is a version of this story circulating in staffrooms and supply Facebook groups that goes: the government has capped supply teacher pay at £40 a day. It is completely wrong, it is understandable, and it is worth dismantling properly, because the thing it misdescribes is real and is in force right now — and buried inside it is a provision that genuinely could get a supply teacher a permanent job.

This guide sets out what RM6376 actually does, who it binds, what the fee caps are caps on, and — the part that matters most — what a supply teacher who is not a party to any of it can usefully do with the information. It is a companion to our comparison of local authority supply pools and agencies, which covers the other side of the same question: what a day of supply cover is actually worth depending on who employs you.

What RM6376 actually is

RM6376 is the reference number of a framework agreement called Supply Teachers and Education Recruitment, abbreviated by everyone involved to STeER. A framework agreement is a procurement device, not a piece of employment law: it is a pre-competed, pre-negotiated arrangement with a list of approved suppliers, on standard terms, that public bodies can buy from without each running its own full tender exercise.

In this case the public bodies are schools, academy trusts and other education organisations, and the thing being bought is temporary staff — supply teachers most prominently, but also educational support staff, facilities staff and administrative staff. The suppliers are recruitment agencies. The framework is live from 30 April 2026 to 29 April 2029, a three-year term, and although the formal start date is the end of April it is widely described as having launched in May 2026.

It was negotiated by the Department for Education, working with the regional public sector buying organisations ESPO, NEPO and YPO — which is unusual and worth noting, because it means the terms were shaped by the department that understands schools rather than purely by a central commercial function. The DfE’s stated purposes for it are:

• Capping fees — putting a hard ceiling on what suppliers may charge schools as their own margin on a temporary placement.
• Addressing unacceptable practices in the education recruitment market.
• Delivering frontline savings — money not spent on supplier fees stays in school budgets.
• Consistent safeguarding — every framework supplier vets in line with Keeping Children Safe in Education, removing the variation schools used to encounter between agencies.
• Cutting procurement effort — standard terms and a short order form, so a school does not have to negotiate a contract every time it needs cover.

The DfE’s own explanation for schools and trusts sits on its Get help buying for schools service, and there is a fuller write-up on the Buying for Schools blog published on 29 April 2026, the day before the framework went live.

Who runs it: CCS became the GCA on 1 April 2026

One naming point will save you a lot of confusion when you start reading around this. RM6376 is operated by the Government Commercial Agency (GCA). The GCA was formed on 1 April 2026, when Crown Commercial Service and several Cabinet Office central commercial teams were combined into a single integrated commercial agency, in response to the Cabinet Office Futures Programme and the Arm’s Length Body Review.

The practical consequence is that a great deal of the material about this framework — including some published after April 2026, because organisations are slow to update copy — refers to “CCS” or “the Crown Commercial Service framework”. It is the same framework. The “RM” prefix on the reference number is itself a CCS-era convention that has carried over. If a page tells you RM6376 is a CCS framework and another tells you it is a GCA framework, neither is lying to you; one of them is just older. The agency’s own site is at gca.gov.uk.

The two lots

The framework is divided into two lots, and which one a school is buying through affects who you end up dealing with day to day.

For a supply teacher the distinction rarely changes the job. It occasionally changes who answers the phone about a timesheet, and it can change whether the agency you are registered with is the one holding the framework contract or is sitting one layer down. If you want to know, ask your consultant which lot the placement runs under — it is a perfectly normal question and a consultant who cannot answer it probably is not on the framework at all.

The daily supplier fee caps

Here are the published caps. Read the column heading carefully, because the entire point of this page is what these numbers are numbers for: they are the maximum the supplier may charge a school as its own fee, on top of the worker’s basic pay and the associated employment costs on that pay.

A few features of that table are worth drawing out. The STEM premium is explicit — a supplier may charge £45 a day for a STEM teacher against £40 for a non-STEM teacher, a recognition in hard procurement terms of the shortage in maths, physics, chemistry and computing that the supply market has priced in informally for years. SEND support staff attract a higher cap (£38) than non-SEND support staff (£36), for the same reason. And the senior-role cap of £55 covers headteacher and senior leadership cover, which is a comparatively small market but an expensive one.

The cap is on the supplier’s fee, not on your pay

It is easy to see how the misreading takes hold. A headline says “supply teacher fees capped at £40 a day”; £40 a day is a number that sounds like the sort of thing a day rate might be if you squint; and supply teachers have every reason to expect bad news about their pay. But the word doing the work in that sentence is fees, and in procurement a fee is what the supplier charges for supplying, not what the supplied person is paid.

It is worth being precise about the three different numbers in play here, because they are routinely confused and two of them are invisible to you:

What actually sits underneath the cap

A worked illustration makes the structure obvious. All the figures below are illustrative modelling apart from the £40 cap itself, which is the published figure for a non-STEM teacher. We assume employer National Insurance at 15 per cent and the Apprenticeship Levy at 0.5 per cent on the worker’s gross, and rolled-up holiday pay at 12.07 per cent inside that gross.

Of that £173.16 gross, roughly £18.65 is the 12.07 per cent rolled-up holiday uplift, so the pay for the work itself is about £154.51 — and none of those numbers is fixed by the framework. The school and the supplier could have agreed a worker rate twice as high or half as high and the £40 cap would be unaffected, because the cap does not attach to the worker’s pay at any point.

The real read-across, and it is indirect

So does the framework do anything at all for a supply teacher’s pay? Genuinely, yes — but the mechanism is indirect and it is important not to oversell it.

A school has a cover budget. That budget has always been split, invisibly to the teacher, between money that reaches the person standing in front of the class and money that pays the agency for arranging it. Where a supplier fee was previously £70 or £80 a day, a hard cap of £40 for a non-STEM teacher removes a substantial slice of the school’s spend from the supplier’s side of that split. On the illustration above, moving a fee from £70 to the £40 cap while holding the school’s total charge rate constant would leave roughly £26 a day more of gross pay underneath.

But nothing in the framework requires that to happen. A school facing the same capped fee has two entirely legitimate options: pay the same total charge rate and let the extra flow into the worker’s rate, or pay a lower total charge rate and keep the saving in the school budget. The DfE’s own framing — delivering frontline savings — points at the second. Most schools, under the budget pressures set out in our guide to why academy trusts are making teachers redundant in 2026, will take the saving.

What the cap does change is the economics of the conversation. A school that wants a particular supply teacher and knows the supplier fee is capped can see much more clearly what an increase in the worker’s rate actually costs it, because the fee component no longer moves. And an agency that used to justify a low worker rate by pointing vaguely at its own costs has a smaller and now publicly known margin to point at. That is a weaker thing than a pay guarantee and a stronger thing than nothing.

Free temp-to-perm after 12 weeks

This is, for a supply teacher, the most consequential provision in the whole framework, and it gets almost none of the attention the fee caps get.

Under RM6376, a school may take a supply worker on permanently with no transfer fee once the worker has completed at least 12 weeks of work, on four weeks’ notice to the supplier. Where a school wants to convert someone before the 12 weeks are up, discounted transfer fees apply rather than the full commercial rate.

To see why this matters, consider how the conversation used to go. A supply teacher covers a long-term absence, is good, is liked by the department, and the head would happily offer them a post. The school business manager then discovers that the agency’s terms of business require a transfer fee — frequently a four-figure sum, sometimes a percentage of first-year salary — to engage that teacher directly. A school that is already running a tight budget looks at that number and decides to advertise the post externally instead. The supply teacher never learns why. They simply find that a school which seemed enthusiastic went quiet and then ran a recruitment round they had to apply to like a stranger.

The transfer fee has been, for years, the single biggest structural reason a school that liked a supply teacher did not simply hire them. After 12 weeks of work on a framework placement, that obstacle is gone entirely.

Two different 12-week clocks — do not conflate them

There are now two twelve-week periods in a supply teacher’s life and they come from completely different places. Getting them confused is the easiest mistake to make on this subject, so here they are side by side.

On a single long booking the two will often mature at around the same time, which is convenient and entirely coincidental. They are not the same clock, they do not have the same rules, and a break that pauses one may have a different effect on the other. For the statutory side, including exactly what does and does not reset the qualifying period, see the AWR 12-week rule for supply teachers and, for the question everybody asks, whether school holidays reset the clock.

The academy trust mandate from September 2026

The framework would be a good deal less significant if using it were optional for everyone. It is not.

From September 2026, the Academy Trust Handbook 2026 requires single and multi-academy trusts to procure supply staff through RM6376. The mandate has a carve-out rather than being absolute: a trust may use alternative arrangements provided that those arrangements

• comply with the Procurement Act 2023;
• meet the relevant financial thresholds; and
• do not exceed the rates available through the GCA framework.

That third condition is the one with teeth. A trust cannot simply decide the framework is inconvenient and carry on as before at higher supplier fees; if it goes elsewhere, it has to go somewhere at least as cheap. Existing compliant contracts may run to their termination rather than being torn up, but trusts are told to compare their contracted rates against GCA framework rates when those agreements come to an end.

Local-authority-maintained schools are in a different position. They may use the framework voluntarily, and many will because it is easier than running their own process, but it is not mandated for them. That asymmetry is worth holding in mind: if you work across both trust and maintained schools, the trust placements are much more likely to be running on framework terms — including the capped fee and the temp-to-perm provision — than the maintained ones.

The mandate also has to be read against what is happening to trust finances generally. Sector staff costs and deficit pressures are the context in which the DfE is pushing hard on procurement savings, and a capped supplier fee is one of the very few levers a trust can pull that reduces cost without reducing staffing. Our guide to trust finances and the 2026 redundancy wave sets out that backdrop in detail.

What the framework does not give you

It would be easy to end a page like this on an upbeat note about a government framework improving things for supply teachers. That would be misleading, so here is the limitation stated as plainly as we can put it.

RM6376 is a procurement instrument. It binds the school or trust as buyer and the agency as supplier. You are not a party to it. The framework creates no directly enforceable right for a supply teacher. You cannot sue on it. You cannot compel disclosure of a margin under it. If a supplier charges a school more than the capped fee, that is a breach of the supplier’s obligations to the buyer and the framework operator, and it is for them to deal with — it is not a wrong done to you and it gives you no claim.

• It does not set a minimum day rate for supply teachers.
• It does not require any part of a capped fee saving to be passed to the worker.
• It does not give you a right to see what your agency charged the school.
• It does not give you a remedy if the cap is breached.
• It does not apply at all to a placement with a school that is not buying through the framework — which includes most maintained schools, for whom it is voluntary.
• It does not change your employment status, your employer, your pension position or your statutory rights, all of which are governed by entirely separate law.

Your enforceable rights as a supply teacher come from somewhere else entirely: the Agency Workers Regulations 2010 for pay parity after the qualifying period, the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 for the Key Information Document, the Working Time Regulations for holiday pay, and the Employment Rights Act for unlawful deductions from wages. RM6376 sits alongside all of that as commercial context, not as a source of rights.

What to actually do with this information

Given all of the above, here is the short list of things that are genuinely worth doing, in rough order of usefulness.

What is verified and what is modelling

Verified: the framework reference and name; its operation by the Government Commercial Agency, formed on 1 April 2026 from Crown Commercial Service and Cabinet Office central commercial teams; its negotiation by the DfE with ESPO, NEPO and YPO; the term from 30 April 2026 to 29 April 2029; the two lots; the DfE’s stated aims including Keeping Children Safe in Education vetting consistency; the full daily supplier fee cap table; the fact that the caps apply to fees charged on top of the worker’s basic pay and associated employment costs; the temp-to-perm terms of no fee after at least 12 weeks of work on four weeks’ notice, with discounted fees before that; and the Academy Trust Handbook 2026 mandate from September 2026 with its Procurement Act 2023, financial threshold and rate-comparison conditions, existing-contract run-off and voluntary status for maintained schools.

Illustrative modelling: every figure in the worked charge-rate breakdown other than the £40 cap itself, including the £173.16 gross, the employer National Insurance and Apprenticeship Levy amounts, the holiday pay split, and the £70-to-£40 fee comparison used to size the indirect effect. Supplier fees before the framework varied enormously and there is no single published figure for what they were; the £70 is a plausible illustration for the purpose of showing direction of travel, not a measured average.