Early Years & Nursery Teacher Pay Explained: The State-vs-Private Divide (2026/27)

Almost every other page on this site can assume a shared framework. A secondary head of maths and a primary class teacher are paid from the same statutory document, argue about the same allowances and accrue the same pension. The disagreements are about where you sit within the framework.

Early years is the one part of English education where that assumption collapses completely. Two people can teach three-year-olds in buildings a few hundred metres apart, do recognisably the same work to recognisably the same standard, and be governed by different qualification regimes, different pay frameworks, different conditions of service and different pension schemes — with a gap between them that runs to five figures a year and considerably more once pension is counted.

This page is about that fork: what determines which side of it you are on, what each side is actually worth, and why the better-paid side of it is the one currently in financial trouble.

The fork that decides everything

Two variables determine your position, and they are not the ones people expect. It is not how well qualified you are, how old the children are, or whether the setting takes government-funded hours. It is which status you hold and what kind of institution employs you.

Everything below expands the two columns. The short version is that the left-hand column is the ordinary teaching profession and the right-hand column is not part of it at all.

Maintained nursery schools are schools

This is the point most often missed, including by people who work in early years, and it is the foundation for everything on the maintained side.

A maintained nursery school — an MNS — is not a nursery that happens to receive funding. It is a maintained school in law, with its own governing body, its own headteacher, its own Ofsted registration as a school, and the same core statutory requirements as a maintained primary. There are around 376 of them in England, a number that has been falling for decades.

The requirements that follow from that status are the ones that matter for pay:

• It must have a headteacher. Paid on the leadership group pay range, with an individual pay range set within a headteacher group determined by the STPCD's unit score calculation — covered in detail below, because it produces a distinctive result for nursery schools.
• It must employ qualified teachers. Not early years practitioners with teaching duties, but teachers, on the STPCD ranges, with statutory conditions of service.
• It must designate a qualified teacher as SENCO. The same duty that applies to maintained mainstream schools and academies, with the same three-year window for a newly appointed SENCO to obtain the national SEN co-ordination award — now the NPQ for SENCOs.
• Statutory ratios require a school teacher in the room. For children aged three and over in a maintained nursery school or a nursery class in a maintained school, there must be at least one member of staff for every 13 children, one of whom must be a school teacher within the meaning of section 122 of the Education Act 2002, with another holding an approved level 3 qualification.

What an MNS teacher is actually paid

There is no early years variant of the teacher pay scale. A qualified teacher in a maintained nursery school is paid from the same table as everyone else.

Progression works identically too: movement up the Main Pay Range by appraisal against the school's pay policy, and access to the Upper Pay Range by threshold application demonstrating highly competent practice and a substantial and sustained contribution. TLR payments are available for sustained additional responsibilities on the ordinary paragraph 20 criteria, although in a small nursery school there are correspondingly few TLR-bearing posts in the structure. The full ranges, including all four regional bands, are on our 2026/27 pay scales page.

Conditions of service are the same as well, and they are worth naming explicitly because their absence on the other side of the fork is so consequential: the 1,265-hour limit on directed time, the guaranteed allocation of planning, preparation and assessment time, the statutory limits on what a teacher can be directed to do, and the Burgundy Book sickness and maternity provisions where the local authority applies them.

MNS headteacher pay and the unit score problem

Maintained nursery school headteachers sit on the leadership group pay range like every other head, with their individual range set from within one of the eight headteacher groups. But the arithmetic that assigns a nursery school to a group produces a predictable and structurally awkward result, and it is worth understanding if you are considering an MNS headship.

The STPCD assigns an ordinary school to a headteacher group by a total unit score: pupils on the school register, weighted by key stage. Nursery children fall in the preliminary stage, weighted at 7 units each — the lowest weighting in the table. Two further rules then push the score down again:

The consequence is that MNS headships sit almost universally in the lowest headteacher group, on a range running from £60,619 to £80,652 outside London for 2026/27, while carrying the full statutory accountability of a headteacher: governance, safeguarding, Ofsted, budget-setting, and in many cases leading the local authority's most complex early years SEND provision. Compare the special school position, where the STPCD explicitly compensates for staffing intensity with a staff-pupil ratio modifier of up to six and no Group 1 at all — a mechanism our special school pay guide sets out in full. Nursery schools, which are similarly staff-intensive relative to their roll, get no equivalent adjustment.

EYTS is not QTS, and the difference is structural

Now the other side of the fork, and the misunderstanding that does the most damage.

Early Years Teacher Status is awarded on completion of Early Years Initial Teacher Training. EYITT is a genuine, DfE-funded initial teacher training route — the department allocates and funds places each academic year, funds two of the four training routes (the full-time graduate entry route and the part-time graduate employment-based route), and offers training bursaries scaled by degree classification, alongside training grants and employer incentives. Funding guidance has been published for the 2026 to 2027 academic year and allocations methodology for 2027 to 2028, so this is a continuing programme rather than a legacy one.

What it is not is a route to QTS. EYTS and QTS are separate statuses assessed against separate sets of standards, and holding one does not confer or lead to the other. The practical consequences are stark and they are all financial:

• No STPCD coverage. The School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document applies to school teachers within the meaning of section 122 of the Education Act 2002 employed in maintained schools. An EYTS holder in a PVI setting is outside it entirely — there is no pay range, no allowance framework, no pay policy obligation, no appeal mechanism and no statutory conditions of service.
• No Teachers' Pension Scheme access. TPS membership requires employment in a teaching capacity at a participating institution. PVI nurseries do not participate. You would be auto-enrolled into a workplace pension instead.
• No right to teach reception in a maintained school. That requires QTS. Academies and independent schools may appoint EYTS holders because neither is required to employ QTS teachers, but that does not change your status for any subsequent move.
• No statutory directed time limit and no guaranteed PPA. Early years settings typically operate on year-round opening with full-day shift patterns, so the working year is materially longer than a school teacher's even before comparing salary.
• No automatic conversion route. Moving from EYTS to QTS means undertaking initial teacher training or an assessment-only route on its merits. It is not an upgrade, a top-up or a recognition exercise.

What an EYTS holder in a PVI setting is actually paid

Because there is no statutory scale, the honest answer describes a market rather than a table — and the anchor point for that market is not teacher pay but the wage floor.

The National Living Wage from April 2026 is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, up from £12.21, an increase of around 4.1%. Full-time, year-round, that is roughly £24,785 on a 37.5-hour week or £26,437 on a 40-hour week, before any premium at all for qualification or responsibility.

Sector analysis puts early years pay uncomfortably close to that floor. The median hourly wage in group-based childcare settings has been found sitting only around £2 above the National Living Wage, and early years workers earning substantially less on average than comparably qualified workers in other sectors even after a period of strong headline pay growth — growth driven in large part by the National Living Wage rising underneath the sector rather than by the sector pulling away from it. A Nursery World cost-of-living survey found around 13% of early years staff had taken a second job to make ends meet.

The pension gap nobody mentions at interview

The salary gap between the two columns is visible. The pension gap is not, and over a career it is the larger of the two.

A qualified teacher in a maintained nursery school is in the Teachers' Pension Scheme — a career average defined benefit scheme with a substantial employer contribution, index-linked accrual and a guaranteed benefit at retirement that does not depend on investment performance. An EYTS holder in a PVI nursery is in an auto-enrolment defined contribution workplace pension, where the employer contributes at the statutory minimum unless it chooses otherwise and the eventual benefit depends entirely on contributions and market returns.

Those are not two versions of the same thing. They are different categories of retirement provision with materially different risk borne by the individual, and the difference does not show up anywhere on a comparison of gross salaries. Our pension section covers how TPS accrual actually works, and the independent schools and the TPS guide works through the same comparison in a different context — the arithmetic there translates directly.

Nursery classes in primary schools: a third position

A nursery class attached to a maintained primary school is a third arrangement, and in pay terms it sits firmly on the maintained side of the fork. A qualified teacher teaching that class is a school teacher in the primary school, on the STPCD, in the TPS, on the school's pay policy, with statutory conditions. The children may be the same age as those in a nursery school down the road and the ratio requirement is the same 1:13 with a school teacher in the room, but the employment framework is the primary school's.

This matters more than it used to because of the expansion of school-based nursery provision. Where a primary school opens or expands nursery provision, the teaching posts created are ordinary maintained school teaching posts, which is a straightforwardly better position for a teacher than the equivalent PVI post — and, from a sector perspective, a reason maintained nursery schools worry about school-based expansion drawing children away from settings whose funding depends on headcount.

The maintained nursery school funding crisis

The better-paid side of this fork is the side in financial trouble, and the position as of 2026 is serious enough that anyone considering a career in a maintained nursery school should understand it.

Early Education, working with the NAHT and the NEU, surveyed maintained nursery schools between February and March 2026 and published the results in June 2026. The survey drew 158 responses covering 167 of England's 376 maintained nursery schools — a response rate of around 44%, which for a sector survey is high enough to take seriously while still being a self-selecting sample rather than an official statistic. The findings:

That is a sharp deterioration on an already poor baseline. By 2022-23 the proportion of maintained nursery schools in deficit had risen to around 32.5%, against 18.2% in 2016-17, with the aggregate deficit growing from roughly £4 million to roughly £24 million over that period while income per pupil stayed flat and rose across the rest of the schools sector.

The staffing consequence is the part that matters on a pay site. A sector where nearly three quarters of settings are planning cuts, freezes or reductions is not a sector where pay progression conversations go well, where TLRs get created, or where vacancies get filled promptly. The mandatory costs described earlier in this page — a headteacher, a designated SENCO, qualified teachers in ratio — are precisely the costs a school under financial pressure cannot cut, which pushes the reductions onto everything else: support staff hours, outreach, family services, specialist provision and the discretionary parts of the offer.

Why the supplementary funding is stuck in 2016-17

The mechanism behind the squeeze is specific, documented and unusually easy to explain, which is rare in school funding.

When the early years national funding formula was introduced for 2017-18, it moved to a broadly common hourly rate for funded entitlement hours across all provider types. Maintained nursery schools, carrying school-level fixed costs that private providers do not, could not be sustained on that rate alone, so the government introduced supplementary funding for them — an additional grant on top of the hourly rate, intended to bridge the gap while a longer-term solution was found.

Three features of how that supplement was designed have compounded over the decade since:

A separate and substantial pressure sits alongside it: because maintained nursery schools are schools, they are liable for business rates, reportedly running to as much as £137,500 a year for a single school, and reform of that treatment has been under discussion without resolution since 2021.

What to do with all this

Four practical conclusions, in the order they matter.

• If you are choosing a training route, choose QTS unless you are certain about PVI. QTS keeps every door open, including every PVI door — a QTS holder can work in a private nursery, but an EYTS holder cannot work in a maintained one as a teacher. EYITT is the right choice for someone committed to leading practice in PVI settings, and it is funded for exactly that, but it is a narrower door.
• If you already hold EYTS and want the maintained sector, plan the QTS route properly. It is a separate qualification requiring initial teacher training or an assessment-only route, not a conversion. Assessment-only routes exist for experienced practitioners and are considerably shorter than a full course, and your existing experience is relevant evidence.
• If you work in a maintained nursery school, read your school's budget position as career information. Deficit status, reserve drawdown and the staffing plan are the things that determine whether pay progression conversations, TLR creation and vacancy filling are realistic in the next two years. Governing body minutes are public documents.
• If you lead early years provision, NPQEYL spans both sides of the divide. It is designed for maintained nursery school heads, early years leads in primary schools and PVI leaders alike, and is one of the fully funded NPQs for eligible staff in state-funded settings. It carries no pay entitlement of its own — none of them do — but it makes you appointable to posts that pay more. Our NPQ guide covers the qualification, the funding rules and where it sits in the suite.

Sources and accuracy

The pay figures on this page — the Main Pay Range, Upper Pay Range and headteacher Group 1 range — are the confirmed 2026/27 figures effective from 1 September 2026, following the Government's acceptance of the School Teachers' Review Body's 36th Report on 1 July 2026, with a further 3% award announced for September 2027. They are national (rest of England) values and match this site's pay scales pages. The headteacher group-sizing rules — the preliminary-stage weighting of 7 units, the halving for part-time attendance, the three-unit uplift for pupils with an EHC plan and its discretionary limb, the Group 1 threshold of 1,000 units and the rule combining unit scores where a headteacher leads more than one school — come from the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document at paragraphs 6.1 to 6.6 and Tables 3 and 4.

The statutory position of maintained nursery schools — that they must employ a headteacher, a SENCO and qualified teachers, meeting the same standards as other schools and academies — and the count of 376 maintained nursery schools in England come from Early Education's published sector briefings. The staffing ratio requirement for children aged three and over in maintained nursery schools and maintained nursery classes, including the requirement that one member of staff be a school teacher within the meaning of section 122 of the Education Act 2002 and another hold an approved level 3 qualification, comes from the statutory framework for the early years foundation stage.

The National Living Wage figure of £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over applies from April 2026, an increase of around 4.1% from £12.21. The annual equivalents quoted are our own arithmetic on 37.5- and 40-hour weeks across 52 weeks and are illustrative rather than a statistic. Early years sector pay comparisons — the median in group-based childcare sitting around £2 above the National Living Wage, the gap against comparable workers in other sectors, and the proportion of staff taking second jobs — come from sector analysis and from Nursery World's cost-of-living survey; advertised salary ranges come from job aggregators and are flagged as such in the body of the page.

The maintained nursery school financial findings come from the survey published in June 2026 by Early Education with the NAHT and the NEU, conducted February to March 2026, drawing 158 responses covering 167 of England's 376 maintained nursery schools. The longer-run deficit comparison (32.5% in deficit by 2022-23 against 18.2% in 2016-17, with the aggregate deficit growing from around £4 million to around £24 million) and the supplementary funding mechanism — its benchmarking to 2016-17 local funding levels, the absence of inflationary uprating, its linkage to universal 15-hour numbers, the fall in universal 15-hour uptake from around 83% in 2016-17 to around 59% in 2024-25, its continuation into the 2026 to 2027 financial year, and the business rates figure — come from Early Education's published briefings on maintained nursery school funding. EYITT funding arrangements, including the routes funded, the bursary structure and the publication of 2026 to 2027 funding guidance and 2027 to 2028 allocations methodology, come from the Department for Education's published EYITT funding guidance.

This is independent guidance for orientation, not legal, financial or careers advice, and it is not affiliated with the Department for Education, Early Education, the NAHT, the NEU, Teachers' Pensions or any teaching union. Your contract of employment and, where you are in a maintained school, your school's pay policy are the documents that determine your position.