Moving Between State and Independent Schools

What actually travels with you

Teaching feels like one profession from the inside. You stand in front of a class, you plan, you mark, you report to parents, and the daily craft of the job is recognisably the same whether the building has a bursar or a business manager. That intuition is exactly why sector moves catch people out. The job is one profession; the employment framework is emphatically two, and the boundary between them runs through almost every term and condition that matters.

The clearest way to think about it is to separate three categories: the things that are attached to you personally and therefore travel; the things that are attached to the employment relationship and therefore reset entirely at the point you change employer; and the one thing — your pension — that is attached to neither and behaves according to its own rules regardless of what either school does.

The asymmetry in that table explains most of the disappointment people report after a move. Everything that feels like your professional identity travels intact, which makes it easy to assume everything else does too. What actually resets is everything that was accumulating quietly in the background: the sick pay scale you had climbed, the maternity entitlement you had qualified for, the pay point that took nine years to reach. None of that is anybody behaving badly. It is simply how employment law and national agreements draw their boundaries.

QTS, induction and the academy change

Qualified teacher status is the most portable thing you own, and also the most widely misunderstood in terms of where it is actually required.

GOV.UK's guidance on QTS sets out the position plainly. QTS is legally required to teach in local authority maintained schools and in non-maintained special schools. It has not been legally required in academies and free schools, which have been able to employ teachers without it. And it is not legally required in independent schools, which may hire teachers regardless of QTS status. This is why a career-changer with deep subject expertise but no teaching qualification can walk into a sixth form post at an independent school, and why the independent sector has a visibly different mix of routes into teaching.

Statutory induction is the credential people forget to protect

Induction matters more than QTS for the specific question of whether a sector move can be reversed later, because QTS is awarded once and kept, whereas induction has to be served somewhere, and not every setting offers it.

The statutory guidance on induction for early career teachers is explicit that there is no legal requirement to complete an induction period if you intend to work solely in the independent sector, in an academy, a free school, a British school overseas, an independent nursery school or a further education institution. But it is equally explicit that induction may be served in those settings where the setting chooses to offer it and meets the statutory arrangements, which include registration with an appropriate body at the start of the induction period. The guidance covers settings that are required to offer induction and settings that choose to.

The practical consequence for an early career teacher considering a first post in an independent school is straightforward but genuinely important: ask, before accepting, whether the school offers statutory induction and which appropriate body it uses. If it does, you can complete induction there and keep the maintained sector open to you for the rest of your career. If it does not, you have not done anything irreversible, but you will need to serve induction later in a setting that does offer it, and the longer you leave it the more awkward that becomes to arrange around a mid-career salary and a mortgage.

Pay is not portable, in either direction

This is the myth that causes the most avoidable financial damage, and the striking thing about it is that it is not really a sector issue at all. Pay portability stopped being a national entitlement within the state sector years ago.

The School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document does not require a school to match the salary a teacher was earning at their previous school. The relevant body — a governing board in a maintained school, or the trust in an academy — determines where on its pay range a newly appointed teacher is placed, in accordance with its own published pay policy. A teacher on the sixth point of the main pay range at one school has no national right to be placed on the equivalent point at the next one.

In practice, most state schools do honour previous pay points, and many write pay portability explicitly into their pay policies, because refusing to do so makes recruitment extremely difficult in a competitive market. That is a widespread local practice, not a national rule, and it is not enforceable by pointing at the STPCD. The distinction becomes very real when a school is under financial pressure, when a teacher is moving into a different phase or role, or when a teacher is returning after a break and the receiving school takes a view about recent experience.

Once you cross into the independent sector, even the practice disappears as a reference point, because independent schools set their own pay structures from scratch. Some publish scales that map closely onto the national ranges and uprate them annually in parallel. Some run entirely bespoke structures with their own point systems. Some negotiate individually with each appointment. All of those are lawful, and none of them owe anything to the STPCD.

The actionable conclusion is the same in every direction of travel: negotiate the number, in writing, before you accept. A teacher moving schools has more leverage at the offer stage than at any other point, and an assumption that pay simply follows is the single most expensive assumption in this entire guide after the pension.

The Burgundy Book stops at the gate

Teachers in the maintained sector tend to know the Burgundy Book by its effects rather than its name. It is the reason occupational sick pay builds up by length of service in a predictable national pattern. It is the reason notice periods follow a termly structure. It sits underneath a great deal of what feels like simply "how teaching works".

Formally, it is the Conditions of Service for School Teachers in England and Wales, most recently revised in June 2023 — its first substantive update in more than two decades. Its own introduction describes it as covering the general field of conditions of service and representing the national agreement between the five teacher associations and local authorities, negotiated through the CLEA/School Teachers' Committee machinery. Its definitions section defines the schools it applies to by reference to primary, nursery, secondary and special schools under the education legislation, and its introduction works through the employer position in community, voluntary controlled, voluntary aided and foundation schools, and in academies — where it notes that the academy trust is the employer, that transferring staff have their conditions protected by transfer legislation, and that new employees will also generally have Burgundy Book conditions incorporated into their individual contracts.

Independent schools appear nowhere in that architecture. They are not local authority employers, they were not party to the national agreement, and no mechanism incorporates its terms into their contracts. This is not a criticism of independent schools and it does not imply their terms are worse — a well-resourced independent school may offer sick pay and maternity provision considerably more generous than the Burgundy Book scale. It means only that there is no national floor, and therefore no assumption you can safely make.

• Occupational sick pay. In a maintained school this follows a national scale that builds with service. In an independent school it is whatever the contract states, which may be a comparable scale, a shorter one, or statutory sick pay alone. Ask for the actual scale in writing.
• Occupational maternity pay. Burgundy Book maternity provision sits above the statutory minimum for those who qualify on service. Independent school provision varies widely and almost always carries its own service qualification, which your previous employment will not count towards.
• Notice periods. The termly notice pattern familiar in the maintained sector is a Burgundy Book feature. Independent school contracts frequently use it too, because it fits the academic year, but they are not obliged to, and the periods can be longer or shorter on either side.
• Continuity of service. Moving employer generally restarts the clock for statutory entitlements such as redundancy pay and unfair dismissal protection. Within local authority employment there are statutory continuity provisions that can preserve it in defined circumstances; moving into an independent school will not normally do so.
• Grievance and disciplinary procedures. These sit with the governing body in locally managed state schools and with the employer in an independent school, governed by the contract and by general employment law rather than by a national agreement.
• Union recognition. Collective bargaining arrangements are a matter for the individual independent school. Some recognise teaching unions and consult formally; others do not. This becomes highly material if the school ever consults on changing pension provision.

Pension: the part that outlasts the job

Every other item in this guide is recoverable. A disappointing pay placement can be improved at the next appraisal or the next move. A thin sick pay scale matters only if you need it. Pension decisions are different, because the cost of getting one wrong is locked in at the moment it happens and compounds silently for decades.

The first thing to establish about any independent school post is its Teachers' Pension Scheme status, and there are three genuinely different answers. The school may participate fully, in which case your accrual continues without interruption and the move is pensionally invisible. It may have withdrawn entirely, in which case you stop accruing TPS benefits on joining and receive whatever alternative the school provides. Or it may be in phased withdrawal, in which case existing staff continue but you, as a new appointment, cannot join — phased withdrawal freezes membership as at a set date and admits no new entrants other than by compulsory transfer.

That third case is the one people miss, because a school in phased withdrawal is still, accurately, "in the Teachers' Pension Scheme". Colleagues in the staffroom will be active members. The school's own materials may reasonably describe it as a scheme participant. None of that helps you, because the question that determines your own position is not whether the school participates but whether this post is eligible. Ask it in exactly those terms.

The five-year rule, which nobody will mention to you

Here is the rule that makes sector moves financially distinctive, and it applies symmetrically in both directions. Teachers' Pensions states that where you have a break in pensionable service of more than five years, the salary link is broken, and it will use the salaries at the time of the break to calculate your final salary benefits. A break of five years or less preserves the link.

For a teacher with pre-2015 final salary service — which, following the McCloud remedy, means most teachers who entered the profession before 2012 — that link is one of the most valuable features of the whole scheme. It means benefits earned in the 1990s and 2000s are calculated using the salary you are on when you actually retire, carrying every subsequent promotion and every pay award into the calculation. Break the link and those benefits are frozen against the salary you were on at the break, and nothing you do afterwards restores them.

Work through what that means for a sector move. A teacher leaves a maintained school in 2027 on £48,000 to join an independent school that withdrew from the TPS in 2022. They enjoy the job and stay seven years. They return to the state sector in 2034 and eventually retire in 2046 as a head of department on a considerably higher salary. Because the break exceeded five years, their pre-2015 benefits are calculated on £48,000 rather than on their actual final salary — a permanent reduction to a tranche of pension built up over fifteen or twenty years of work. Had they moved back after four years instead of seven, the link would have held.

None of this is an argument against moving sectors. Plenty of teachers have excellent reasons to move and plenty of independent schools remain full TPS participants, in which case the rule never bites at all. It is an argument for asking Teachers' Pensions about your own record before you resign, and for treating the five-year mark as a real decision point if you do end up out of pensionable service. A guide cannot tell you your figure. Teachers' Pensions can, and asking costs nothing.

NPQs and the CPD funding gap

This is a genuine, quantifiable difference between the sectors that almost never appears in discussions of sector moves, probably because it is a cost that materialises two or three years after the decision rather than on the first payslip.

National Professional Qualifications are the main structured leadership and specialist development route in English education, and for teachers in publicly funded settings the Department for Education has funded them through scholarship funding covering course fees. The Department's guidance for the autumn 2026 recruitment period sets out that scholarship funding is available for teachers and leaders in publicly funded schools, including maintained nursery schools, and in 16 to 19 educational settings in England, alongside hospital schools, young offender institutions, and local authority virtual school headteachers and staff in defined roles. For that period, funding for the SENCO, senior leadership and headship NPQs is available across eligible settings, while the disadvantage-linked NPQs are targeted at the half of publicly funded schools with the highest proportion of pupils attracting pupil premium.

Mainstream independent schools are not on the eligible settings list. A teacher who moves from a state school to an independent school therefore moves out of the scholarship funding system, and any NPQ undertaken afterwards is funded either by the school from its own budget or by the individual. Given that NPQ course fees run to several thousand pounds, and that a teacher progressing from a specialist NPQ through senior leadership to headship might take three of them across a career, the lifetime difference is material.

The wider CPD picture is less one-sided than the NPQ position suggests, and it would be misleading to present it as a straightforward disadvantage. Independent schools are not constrained by the funding architecture that shapes state sector CPD, and many fund external qualifications, subject associations, conference attendance and postgraduate study from their own budgets on a scale a maintained school could not contemplate. The point is not that independent sector CPD is worse. It is that it is discretionary and school-specific rather than nationally funded, so it has to be asked about at interview rather than assumed.

Working conditions: reported versus documented

We want to be careful here, because this is the part of the sector comparison where confident assertions outnumber evidence by a wide margin, and we would rather be useful than authoritative-sounding.

Several differences between the sectors are so widely and consistently reported by teachers who have worked in both that it would be unhelpful not to mention them. Independent school terms are commonly described as shorter, with longer holidays but a more compressed and intense term. Saturday commitments — teaching, sport, or supervision of co-curricular activity — are commonly reported in some independent schools, particularly those with boarding provision or a strong games tradition. Boarding schools are commonly described as involving residential duties, evening and weekend supervision, and sometimes accommodation provided as part of the package. Class sizes in the independent sector are commonly reported as smaller.

The genuinely useful reframing is that the variation within the independent sector is enormous, probably larger than the average difference between the sectors. A small urban day school with no boarding and no Saturday timetable is a fundamentally different working proposition from a full boarding school with a six-day week, and both are independent schools. Sector-level generalisation is therefore weak evidence about any specific job. The contract and the timetable in front of you are strong evidence, and they are available to you before you accept.

One documented difference is worth stating plainly, because it is structural rather than anecdotal: the conditions provisions of the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document — directed time, the 1265-hour limit, guaranteed PPA, the limits on routine cover — apply to maintained schools and do not bind independent schools at all. Whatever working pattern an independent school operates, it is not constrained by that framework. Some independent schools mirror it voluntarily; many do not, and have no reason to. That is a real difference in the legal floor beneath your working week, and it is one you can verify from the documents rather than from impressions.

Why no reliable pay comparison exists

The question every teacher considering this move actually wants answered is whether independent schools pay more. We looked specifically for a credible source and concluded that one does not exist. That finding is worth setting out, because the absence is itself informative and because it explains why the confident comparisons circulating online should be treated with suspicion.

• The Independent Schools Council census does not collect pay. The ISC's annual census is the principal published dataset on the independent sector in the UK, covering pupil numbers, fees, staffing headcount and school characteristics. It does not report teacher salaries, pay scales or remuneration, so it cannot support a pay comparison however it is analysed.
• The School Workforce Census excludes independent schools. The Department for Education's School Workforce Census does collect detailed pay data, but its published coverage is state-funded schools — local authority maintained schools, academies, free schools and pupil referral units — and it explicitly excludes independent schools, non-maintained special schools and further education colleges. The dataset that has the pay information does not have the independent schools in it.
• There is no current independent research study filling the gap. We could not identify a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies, NFER or equivalent study comparing teacher pay across the two sectors on a like-for-like basis. Sectoral pay analysis in English education is overwhelmingly built on the workforce census, which is precisely the source that excludes the independent sector.
• The available survey material is too old to use. The most frequently cited comparison data comes from union and trade press survey work from around 2018. Given VAT on fees, the pension withdrawals covered in our companion guide, several years of national pay awards and substantial inflation since, figures from that period cannot responsibly be presented as describing the current market.

The honest conclusion is that sector-wide pay comparison is unanswerable with current public data, and that this is a real data gap rather than a gap in our research. It is also, on reflection, less of a practical problem than it first appears. You are not choosing between two sectors in the abstract. You are choosing between your current post and one specific offer, and that offer comes with an actual number attached. Compare that number against the current national pay ranges for your experience and responsibility level, weigh it against the pension position, the CPD funding position and the contractual terms set out above, and you have done a far more useful analysis than any sector average could have given you.

Questions to ask before you accept

Everything above condenses into a short due diligence process. The ordering matters: the earlier items are the ones where the answer might change your mind, and the later ones are the ones where the answer changes what you negotiate.

None of these questions is awkward to ask, and none of them will count against you at offer stage. A school that has thought carefully about its pension arrangements and its CPD budget will answer them readily, and a school that becomes evasive has told you something useful. The one item worth doing before you even get to offer stage is the Teachers' Pensions enquiry, because it is the only one where the information sits outside the recruitment process entirely and where the cost of finding out too late is permanent.