Local Authority Supply Pools vs Agencies: The Real Difference

Almost every comparison of supply routes you will read online stops at the same place: agencies take a margin, direct work does not, so direct work pays better. That is true as far as it goes, and our guide to supply teacher pay walks through the umbrella deduction waterfall that produces the gap. But it misses the two provisions that actually do the work, and both of them are written down in places supply teachers rarely look: one paragraph of the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document, and the eligibility rules of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme.

Those two provisions are the reason the gap between a local authority pool day and an agency day is much larger than the umbrella margin alone would suggest — and they are also the reason the gap is about to narrow materially in April 2027, which nobody seems to have noticed yet. This guide works both through with the real 2026/27 figures, and then tells you the awkward truth about whether a pool is even available where you live.

What a local authority supply pool actually is

A local authority supply pool — sometimes called a supply register, a supply bank, a cover pool or simply “the council list” — is a register of vetted, qualified teachers that schools within the authority can book from without going through a commercial recruitment agency. In its classic form the authority holds the safeguarding checks, holds the register, takes the school’s request, matches a teacher to it, and pays that teacher through the authority’s own payroll.

The mechanics vary. Some authorities run the whole thing in-house through their school-workforce or education-HR team. Some have moved the booking layer onto a third-party platform — Teacher Booker is the best known, and hosts pools for a number of local authorities and multi-academy trusts — while keeping the employment relationship with the authority or the school. Some have spun the service into a trading arm or a schools-services company. Some operate something that is functionally an in-house agency, with its own margin, sitting inside the council.

None of that surface detail is what matters to your pay packet. The question that matters is a single one: who employs you for the day? If the answer is the local authority, or a maintained school, or an academy trust, then two sets of rules bite that do not bite when the answer is “an umbrella company on an agency’s panel”. Everything else in this guide follows from that.

The honest position on coverage

Here is the part most articles on this subject quietly skip. Local authority supply pools do still exist in some areas, and platforms such as Teacher Booker host pools for a number of authorities and trusts. But coverage across England is patchy and inconsistent. A great many authorities wound their pools down over the last decade or so as budgets tightened and schools converted to academies; some run a pool for one phase only, typically primary; some limit it to part of the authority area; and some operate a register that exists on paper but generates very little actual work because local schools have long since defaulted to ringing an agency.

Critically, and this is the single most useful thing on this page: there is no national directory of which local authorities still run a supply pool. There is no Department for Education register of them, no published list, and no reliable third-party index. Anyone who tells you “your council will have one” is guessing. Anyone who tells you “councils stopped doing this years ago” is also guessing. The position is genuinely local, and the only way to establish it for your area is to ask — which is why there is a whole section below on exactly who to ask and what to say.

We have deliberately not named individual authorities as having or not having a pool anywhere in this guide. These arrangements open, close, get outsourced and get renamed often enough that any list we published would be wrong within months, and a supply teacher who relied on it and stopped looking would be worse off than one who picked up the phone.

The STPCD rule that does the real work

The School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document — the statutory pay framework for teachers in maintained schools in England and Wales — contains a provision about short-notice teaching that far too few supply teachers have ever read. It provides that a teacher employed on a day-to-day or other short notice basis must be paid on a daily basis calculated on the assumption that a full working year consists of 195 days, with periods of less than a day calculated pro rata.

It goes further than that. The same framework requires that such a teacher is paid in accordance with the same pay ranges and scale points that apply to other teachers. You are not on a separate supply scale. You are on your point of the main or upper pay range, the one your experience and performance have taken you to, expressed as a daily rate.

So the arithmetic is trivial once you know the rule. Take your annual salary at your pay point and divide it by 195. On the England national (rest of England) scale effective from 1 September 2026, following the STRB’s 36th report and the Government’s acceptance of it in full on 1 July 2026, that produces the day rates in the table below. Note that the STPCD 2026 itself is expected in the autumn after its consultation closes at noon on 23 September 2026, backdated to 1 September 2026, so these are the accepted scale figures rather than a published document you can yet cite by paragraph.

Those are national figures. If you work in inner London, outer London or the fringe, the equivalent salary is higher and so is the ÷195 result — run your own point through the teacher pay point calculator and divide.

The 6.49-hour argument, and why NASUWT tells you to refuse it

There is a recurring dispute here that is worth flagging before you ever accept a booking. NASUWT’s guidance on supply teachers’ pay in England warns members not to accept less than salary divided by 195 for a full day, and specifically flags that some schools wrongly argue that a supply day amounts to only 6.49 hours and pay a corresponding fraction. The 6.49 comes from dividing 1,265 directed hours by 195 days, which is arithmetically correct and entirely beside the point: the framework fixes the daily rate at salary ÷ 195 and applies pro rata only to periods shorter than a day. A full day worked is a full day. If the offer you are given has been derived by re-dividing the day into hours, that is the moment to query it — with the school, and with your union branch, before the booking rather than after the payslip.

The pension eligibility gap

The second structural difference is pensions, and it is the larger of the two in money terms even though it never appears on a payslip as a number you can spend.

Teachers’ Pension Scheme membership depends on being in eligible employment with an accepted employer. A local authority is an accepted employer. So is a maintained school, and so is an academy trust. Supply work performed on any of those payrolls is therefore normally pensionable in the ordinary way: the member contribution comes out at the appropriate tier, the employer contribution goes in on top, and the day counts towards your career-average accrual exactly as a day in a permanent post would.

A general umbrella company is not an accepted employer. When you work through an agency and are paid by an umbrella company, the umbrella is legally your employer, and the work is therefore normally outside the TPS entirely. What you get instead is standard workplace pension auto-enrolment: a defined-contribution scheme with a statutory minimum of 8 per cent of qualifying earnings, of which the employer must fund at least 3 per cent. That is a real pension and it is better than nothing, but it is a fundamentally different product — you carry the investment risk, there is no guaranteed benefit, and the money going in is a fraction of what goes into the TPS for the same day of teaching.

The 2026/27 TPS numbers you need for the comparison below are these. The employer contribution is 28.68 per cent of pensionable pay, including the 0.08 per cent administration levy. Member contributions are tiered: up to £32,947 is 7.4 per cent; £32,948 to £43,945 is 8.6 per cent; £43,946 to £51,681 is 9.6 per cent; £51,682 to £67,819 is 10.2 per cent; £67,820 to £92,697 is 11.3 per cent; and above £92,697 is 11.7 per cent. Benefits accrue on a career-average basis at 1/57th of pensionable pay each year, revalued at CPI plus 1.6 per cent for as long as you remain in active service. The scheme’s own site at teacherspensions.co.uk is the authority for all of it.

The worked comparison: same headline day, very different day

Take a teacher at M6. Their STPCD daily supply rate is £46,940 ÷ 195 = £240.72. Now imagine an agency offering that same teacher a booking at a headline assignment rate of £240 a day — to all appearances, the same money. Here is what each day actually delivers.

Every figure that follows is illustrative. The scale figures, contribution rates and the ÷195 rule are real; the umbrella margin, the number of days worked and the assumption about marginal tax rates are modelling choices, spelled out so you can redo them with your own numbers. We assume throughout that the teacher’s total earnings for the year sit comfortably above the National Insurance primary threshold and within the basic rate band, so marginal rates of 20 per cent income tax and 8 per cent employee National Insurance apply to the day’s pay. For a precise figure on your own circumstances use the teacher take-home pay calculator.

Side one: the local authority pool day

Read the last two rows carefully, because they are the part of a teaching day that nobody puts on a payslip. The employer’s £69.04 is not a notional accounting entry. It is money a public body pays into a funded promise because you worked that day, and it is the reason the total value of an M6 pool day is not £240.72 but something closer to £309.76 once the employer contribution is counted alongside the gross.

Side two: the agency day at the same headline rate

On the agency side, the £240 headline is an assignment rate — what the agency pays the umbrella company per day worked, which is itself less than the charge rate the agency bills the school. Three employer-side costs come out of it before your gross pay is even calculated. We assume a flat umbrella margin of £5 a day (a £25 weekly fee across five days), employer National Insurance at 15 per cent, and the Apprenticeship Levy at 0.5 per cent.

Two details in that table deserve a second look. First, the holiday pay: £21.91 of the £203.46 gross is the 12.07 per cent rolled-up uplift, which means part of what looks like pay for the day is actually pay for leave you are not taking — and it comes out of the same assignment rate rather than being added to it. Our guide to rolled-up holiday pay for supply teachers explains when that treatment is even lawful. Second, the employer’s 3 per cent auto-enrolment contribution in an umbrella model is itself normally funded out of the assignment rate, so in practice it shaves the gross figure slightly further; we have left it outside the waterfall to keep the arithmetic readable, which flatters the agency side rather than the pool.

The same comparison across the pay scale

The gap is not a quirk of M6. Applying the same method at four points on the scale, using each point’s own contribution tier, gives the following. All figures are illustrative and assume basic-rate marginal deductions.

The U3 line carries one caveat: a teacher at the top of the upper range working close to a full year would be into the higher rate band, so the 20 per cent assumption would understate their tax and overstate their net. For a supply teacher working part of a year it holds. Again, the take-home pay calculator will do this properly with your actual annual figure.

The pension gap in pounds, and in pension

Put the two M6 columns side by side and the day-level difference is £15.20 of net cash and £63.90 of employer pension contribution — a total of £79.10 a day on identical headline rates. That is where the money actually goes, and note how lopsided it is: barely a fifth of the gap is cash you would notice, and four fifths is pension you would not.

Scale it to a school year. A hundred supply days — a realistic figure for someone working most weeks but not every day — produces the following on the M6 comparison:

• Net cash: £15,483 through the pool against £13,963 through the agency, a difference of about £1,520.
• Employer pension contribution: £6,904 through the pool against roughly £514 through the agency, a difference of about £6,390.
• Total money going into a pension: £9,215 through the pool (employer plus your own member contribution) against about £1,371 through the agency (employer plus employee auto-enrolment) — a ratio of roughly six and a half to one.
• Benefit earned: £24,072 of pensionable pay at 1/57th accrual gives about £422 a year of pension, payable for life, revalued at CPI + 1.6% every year you remain in active service. The agency side gives a defined-contribution pot of about £1,371 plus whatever investment return it happens to earn, with no guarantee attached.

The revaluation point is the one that is easiest to underestimate. £422 a year does not sound like much set against a hundred days of work. But it is £422 that is uprated by CPI plus 1.6 per cent every year you remain an active member, and then paid for the whole of your retirement. Ten such years of supply work, accrued in your forties and revalued for twenty years before it comes into payment, is a materially different retirement from ten years of the same work paid through an umbrella. Model your own position with the Teachers’ Pension calculator rather than taking a single illustrative figure at face value.

What changes on 1 April 2027

Here is a point that has not yet worked its way into the supply-teaching conversation at all. The employer contribution rate of 28.68 per cent is not permanent. Following the latest scheme valuation it falls to 17.68 per cent from 1 April 2027 — an eleven-point reduction in what employers pay into the TPS for every pensionable pound.

That does two things at once, pulling in opposite directions, and it is worth being precise about which is which.

First, the measurable advantage of the pool route in employer-contribution terms shrinks by roughly 40 per cent. Second — and this is the part that cuts the other way — your benefit does not change at all. The TPS is a defined-benefit scheme. Accrual stays at 1/57th of pensionable pay, revaluation stays at CPI plus 1.6 per cent, and the pension you earn for a day’s work is identical either side of April 2027. The employer rate is a funding input, not a benefit formula.

Which means the honest read is that the 2027 change makes the pool route cheaper for schools and authorities to offer without making it any worse for you. A day of directly employed supply cover that costs a school £310 in 2026/27 costs about £283 from April 2027 for exactly the same teacher on exactly the same terms. Whether schools respond by using direct and pool routes more is speculation and we are not going to dress it up as a prediction — but if you are comparing routes over a multi-year horizon, the cost differential between employing a supply teacher directly and buying one through an agency narrows from April 2027, and that is a real change, not a forecast.

Where agencies genuinely win

Everything above is about the value of a day worked. It says nothing whatever about how many days you get, and for a lot of supply teachers that is the only number that matters. It would be dishonest to run three thousand words on the pension gap and leave you with the impression that a pool is automatically the better choice.

• Volume is not guaranteed. A pool is a register, not a contract. If the schools in your authority have spent a decade defaulting to agencies, being on the register may generate a handful of days a term. The best day rate in the world is worth nothing on a day you are not working.
• Coverage can be narrow. Some pools operate for primary only, some for a single district, some only for particular categories of cover. An agency will typically place you across a much wider geography and every phase.
• Agencies fill faster. Agency consultants are on the phone at seven in the morning and have relationships with dozens of schools. A council booking service running office hours cannot compete on same-day cover, and some do not try.
• Agencies reach across boundaries. If you live near an authority border, or are willing to travel, an agency network will surface work in three or four authorities at once where a pool covers one.
• Some teachers genuinely prefer the agency relationship. One point of contact, no council HR process, easy to decline work, easy to take a month off, and no expectation of loyalty in either direction. That is a real product and some people want it.
• Council pools are not immune to margins either. Where an authority has moved the service into a trading arm or an in-house agency, there may well be a fee in the chain and the employment may not be with the authority at all. Ask.

The fair summary is this: the pool route usually wins on what a day is worth; the agency route often wins on how many days there are. A supply teacher in an area with an active pool and plenty of schools using it is much better off on the pool. A supply teacher in an area where the pool is a dormant list is better off with a good agency. Most people, sensibly, register for both and let the work decide.

The middle route: a school’s own direct supply list

There is a third option that gets almost no attention and requires no local authority pool to exist at all: being booked directly by a school onto its own payroll, from its own list of known supply teachers.

Plenty of schools keep such a list. It is usually informal — a set of names in the cover manager’s phone, people who have covered before, are known to be good, and can be rung directly instead of going through an agency at £70 or £80 a day of supplier fee. From the school’s point of view it is cheaper and more reliable. From yours, it produces exactly the same two structural advantages a pool does, because the mechanism is identical:

How to find out whether your authority still runs one

Because there is no national list, this is a phone-and-email exercise. It takes about an hour and it is the only method that produces a reliable answer for your area. Do all five, not just the first.

• Contact your local authority’s HR or school-workforce team directly. The team you want is usually called education HR, schools HR, school workforce services or something similar — not general council HR, which will not know. Ask specifically: do you operate a supply pool or supply register for teachers, who is the employer on it, and is the work TPS-eligible?
• Ask the neighbouring authorities too. Pools are frequently open to teachers who live outside the boundary, and if you are anywhere near a border you may have two or three to try. This is the step most people skip and it is often the one that finds the work.
• Ask the schools you already cover whether they hold a direct supply list. Ask the cover manager or school business manager, not the agency. Many schools maintain one and simply never advertise it, because they fill it by word of mouth.
• Ask your union branch. Local NEU and NASUWT branch officers deal with the supply market in their area constantly and will usually know exactly what the authority runs, what it pays and whether it generates any actual work. This is the fastest route to an honest answer.
• Search the authority’s own website and any booking platform it names. Some authorities publish a supply register page; some point to a platform such as Teacher Booker. If you find a platform, check whether it is running the authority’s own employment or acting as an agency in its own right — the two produce very different payslips.

What is verified and what is not

Supply pay is an area where confident-sounding advice is often wrong, so it is worth separating what is solid from what is modelling.

Verified. The STPCD provision that day-to-day and short-notice teachers are paid on a daily basis assuming a 195-day working year, pro rata for less than a day, and on the same pay ranges and scale points as other teachers. NASUWT’s guidance advising teachers not to accept less than salary ÷ 195 and flagging the incorrect 6.49-hour argument. NASUWT’s statement that there are no national pay and conditions for agency-employed supply teachers. The England national pay scale figures effective 1 September 2026, following the STRB’s 36th report accepted in full by Government on 1 July 2026. The TPS employer contribution of 28.68 per cent for 2026/27 and its reduction to 17.68 per cent from 1 April 2027, the 2026/27 member contribution tiers, the 1/57th accrual rate and CPI + 1.6 per cent in-service revaluation. The auto-enrolment minimum of 8 per cent of qualifying earnings with at least 3 per cent from the employer.

Illustrative modelling, clearly labelled as such. Every net-pay figure in the worked comparison. The £5-a-day umbrella margin, which varies widely between providers. The assumption of basic-rate marginal deductions. The hundred-day school year. The assumption that the agency’s employer auto-enrolment contribution sits outside the assignment-rate waterfall, which flatters the agency side. The employer National Insurance calculation, which treats the day’s pay as wholly above the £5,000 annual secondary threshold and so slightly overstates the employer NI cost for someone working a small number of days.

Not verifiable, and stated as such. Which local authorities currently operate a supply pool. There is no national directory, no DfE register and no reliable published list, and the position changes as services are outsourced, renamed or wound down. We have not named any authority as having or lacking a pool anywhere on this page, and you should treat any source that offers you a definitive national list with scepticism. Ask your authority, your neighbours’ authorities, your schools and your union branch.