Notice Periods for School Support Staff Explained

The short version, in one table

The single most useful thing this page can do is set the two systems side by side, because almost every question support staff ask about notice starts from the assumption that the teachers' rules must apply to everyone in the building. They do not, and the difference is not marginal.

Who counts as school support staff for this purpose

"Support staff" is a broad label covering a genuinely wide range of roles, and the Green Book does not define the category by job title. It applies, via the NJC's constitution, to employees of local authorities and authorities of equivalent status, other than those covered by other national negotiating machinery — and teachers are covered by other machinery, which is precisely why they fall outside it. Everyone else in a maintained school ordinarily falls inside.

• Teaching assistants, HLTAs and learning support assistants — by some distance the largest group, and the one for which the contrast with teachers causes the most confusion.
• Cover supervisors — support staff, not teachers, even though the work happens in front of a class. If you also do supply teaching, you may have two quite different employment relationships running in parallel.
• School business managers, bursars, finance and HR staff — support staff for these purposes, but frequently on individually negotiated contracts with longer notice than the Green Book minimum.
• Administrative, reception and office staff — the classic Green Book population.
• Site managers, caretakers, cleaners and catering staff — often employed directly, sometimes through a contractor, which changes who your employer is and therefore which contract governs your notice.
• Pastoral, attendance, SEN and family support roles — usually support staff, though some are on locally agreed terms that sit outside the standard scales.
• Technicians, librarians and IT staff — likewise.

Two edge cases are worth naming because they come up constantly. First, an unqualified instructor teaching under the STPCD is not support staff — different framework entirely. Second, a member of support staff who also picks up paid supply teaching may be employed in two capacities, sometimes by two different employers, and the notice position for each has to be worked out separately. Our guide to cover supervisor pay deals with the boundary between these roles in more detail.

What the Green Book actually says

The relevant provision is Part 2, paragraph 15, headed "Period of Notice to Terminate Employment". It has two sub-paragraphs, and they do quite different things.

Paragraph 15.2, dealing with notice given by the employee, is a single sentence: the minimum period of notice to terminate employment given by an employee shall be the ordinary period from one pay period to the next.

That is the whole rule. There is no table, no scaling with length of service, and — significantly for anyone coming to this from the teaching side — no mention of terms, half-terms, academic years or school calendars of any kind. The reference point is the payroll cycle, and nothing else.

Paragraph 15.1 handles the other direction — notice given by the employer — and does something different again: it does not create an independent standard at all, but restates the statutory position. It says in terms that the minimum periods of notice to be given by an employer are governed by the Employment Rights Act 1996, and then reproduces the section 86(1) table: one month or more but less than two years' continuous service, not less than one week; two years or more but less than twelve years, not less than one week for each year of continuous service; twelve years or more, not less than twelve weeks.

The asymmetry in paragraph 15 is deliberate and worth understanding. On the employer side, the agreement simply adopts the statutory floor. On the employee side, it goes beyond the statutory floor and imposes something longer. That is the source of the gap explored in the next section, and it is the reason a support staff member who looks up "how much notice do I have to give" and finds the statutory answer will get it wrong.

The gap against the statutory minimum

Section 86 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 sets minimum notice periods, and it treats the two sides of the employment relationship very differently.

Set paragraph 15.2 against section 86(2) and the practical gap becomes obvious. The statutory floor for an employee is one week. The Green Book requires the ordinary period from one pay period to the next, which for the monthly-paid majority is around four to five weeks depending on where in the cycle notice is given. A monthly-paid teaching assistant therefore owes roughly four times what the statute alone would require.

This gap causes real problems in both directions, and both are worth naming plainly.

The first is support staff who look up the statutory position — which is what most general employment advice describes, because it applies to everyone — see "one week", and hand in a week's notice. That is a breach of contract for anyone on Green Book terms, even though the figure they found was entirely accurate as a statement of the statutory minimum. The statute sets a floor below which a contract cannot go; it says nothing about how far above the floor a contract may sit.

The second is support staff who assume that because they work in a school, the teachers' rules must apply, and therefore believe they cannot leave until the end of a term. That belief costs people jobs. A teaching assistant offered a role starting in early November who thinks they cannot move until 31 December may turn it down unnecessarily, when their actual obligation is roughly a month.

What "the ordinary period from one pay period to the next" means in practice

The drafting is compact, and it repays a little unpacking, because it is the operative phrase for the great majority of school support staff in the country.

The phrase does two things at once. It identifies the length of the notice period — the interval between pay periods — and it implies the alignment, running from one pay point to the next rather than from an arbitrary date. In practice, employers apply it in one of two ways, and which one your school uses is worth establishing before you hand anything in.

• Monthly paid (the usual case). The interval between pay periods is a month, so the notice period is a month. Most employers treat notice as running for a calendar month from the date it is given — notice given on 12 November expires on 12 December. Some treat it more literally as running to the end of the following pay period, which would carry it to 31 December.
• Four-weekly paid. Less common in schools but not rare, particularly for some catering and site staff. The interval is four weeks, so that is the notice period.
• Weekly paid. Rare in schools today but the reason the provision is drafted the way it is — a weekly-paid employee's notice period under paragraph 15.2 is a week, which aligns exactly with the statutory minimum in section 86(2).
• Term-time only, paid monthly across twelve months. Your pay period is still monthly, so your notice period is still a month, even in a month you are not scheduled to work.

One further practical point. Paragraph 15.2 states a minimum, so giving more notice than it requires is always permissible and is frequently the sensible thing to do — particularly for a teaching assistant attached to a named pupil with an EHC plan, or a business manager mid-way through a budget cycle, where an abrupt departure creates a genuine problem the school will remember. Equally, an employer can agree to release you earlier than your notice period requires; like any contractual right, the notice provision exists for the employer's benefit and can be waived by them.

Why the two systems are completely different

It is tempting to treat the divergence as an oversight, but it is not. The two agreements were built by different people, for different workforces, around different problems, and each is internally coherent on its own terms.

The teachers' scheme is built around the school year because teacher pay itself is. Section 3 paragraph 1.1 of the Burgundy Book defines three notional terms — Summer from 1 May to 31 August, Autumn from 1 September to 31 December, Spring from 1 January to 30 April — while stating the principle that a teacher should receive not less than one third of a year's salary for each full term's service. Once salary is conceived of in thirds of a year tied to notional terms, it follows naturally that leaving dates are tied to the same boundaries, and that a notice period must expire at one. The whole structure flows from the premise that a teacher's engagement is measured in terms.

The Green Book was never built around schools at all. Its scope, set out in the constitution annexed to the agreement, relates to all employees of local authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and of other authorities of equivalent status, other than those covered by other national negotiating machinery. The same agreement covers refuse collectors, social workers, planning officers, librarians and highways staff. It could not sensibly build its notice provision around the academic calendar, because for the overwhelming majority of the employees it covers, there is no academic calendar. The payroll cycle is the one structure every local government employer genuinely shares.

Neither system is obviously better, and both have costs. The teaching structure protects pupils from mid-year disruption at the price of very limited flexibility for individual teachers — a teacher who misses the 31 May deadline waits until 31 December. The support staff structure gives individuals genuine mobility at the price of a school potentially losing a key member of support staff in the middle of a term, which is a real operational problem and one reason the recruitment and retention picture for teaching assistants looks the way it does.

Term-time only contracts and school holidays

Term-time only working is the norm for teaching assistants and common across other support roles, and it interacts with notice in a way that is worth being explicit about, because it is a frequent source of misunderstanding.

Term-time only is fundamentally a pay calculation arrangement, not a different kind of employment. In the standard model, the employee is employed continuously all year round, works only during term time plus any specified additional days, and their annual salary is calculated by reference to the weeks actually worked plus pro-rata annual leave — then paid in twelve equal monthly instalments so that money arrives evenly across the year. The employment relationship continues throughout the summer; only the working pattern pauses.

Two consequences follow for notice. First, notice can be given and can run during a school holiday, because the employment relationship is live throughout. Notice given on 15 July on a monthly-paid contract will ordinarily expire on or around 15 August, and there is no rule requiring it to be deferred until the school reopens. Second, continuous service for statutory purposes — which drives the employer's notice obligation under section 86(1), statutory redundancy pay, and unfair dismissal qualifying service — runs across the holidays too. A term-time only teaching assistant in their fourth year of employment has four years of continuous service, not four times thirty-nine weeks.

Academies, trusts and what TUPE preserved

As with the Burgundy Book on the teaching side, the Green Book binds you through your contract rather than of its own force, and the academy sector is where that distinction does most of its work.

In a local authority maintained school, support staff are ordinarily employed by the local authority or by the governing body on Green Book terms, and the position is straightforward. In an academy trust, the trust is the employer and sets its own terms. In practice, a very large proportion of trusts have continued to apply Green Book terms to support staff, for two reasons: staff who transferred at conversion did so under TUPE with their existing terms protected, and running two parallel sets of conditions for people doing the same job in the same building is an administrative headache most trusts would rather avoid.

But "most" is not "all". Some trusts have introduced their own support staff contracts for new appointments, with their own notice periods, while transferred staff remain on protected Green Book terms. The result is staffrooms where two teaching assistants doing identical work have materially different notice obligations depending on when they were appointed. If you are in a converted school, the question to ask is not what the trust's policy is in general but what your own contract says. Our TUPE guide explains how the protection works and where its limits lie, and applies to support staff transfers in substantially the same way.

Senior support roles deserve a specific mention. School business managers, finance leads, HR managers and operations directors are very commonly appointed on individually negotiated contracts with notice periods of two or three months, sometimes longer at trust central-team level. That is entirely lawful — paragraph 15.2 is a minimum — but it means the general answer on this page is least likely to apply to exactly the people with the most at stake. Our guide to school business manager salaries covers how those roles are structured and paid.

What your employer must give you

Notice runs both ways, and the employer side is where support staff are most often short-changed — usually through inattention rather than bad faith.

Two points to hold on to. First, these are minimums, and your contract may give you more — if it does, the contract wins. Second, the employer's obligation scales steeply with service while yours does not, which means a long-serving support staff member is in a much stronger position on the receiving end of notice than the symmetry of paragraph 15 might suggest. A site manager with fourteen years' service facing redundancy is entitled to twelve weeks' notice or pay in lieu as an absolute floor, while owing about a month if they resign.

If a redundancy process is live, the notice calculation sits alongside the statutory redundancy payment calculation, which uses a different measure again — and note that the two-year qualifying period for statutory redundancy pay under section 155 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 is not changing in January 2027, even though the unfair dismissal qualifying period is. Our guide to the January 2027 changes sets out what that means for school staff on shorter service, and our redundancy pay guide explains the calculation itself.

What to check in your own contract

Everything on this page is a default. The document that actually governs you is your own written statement of employment particulars, which every employer is required to provide at the commencement of employment. Here is what to look for, in the order worth looking.

• Does the contract state a notice period expressly, in weeks or months? If so, that figure governs — the Green Book minimum is only relevant if the contract is silent or sets a lower figure than the statutory floor.
• Does the contract incorporate the Green Book by name — wording such as 'the NJC National Agreement on Pay and Conditions of Service' or 'the Green Book'? If so, paragraph 15.2 applies where the contract does not say otherwise.
• Does it specify whether notice runs from the date given or to the end of a pay period? Most do not, which is why it is worth asking HR to confirm the expiry date in writing.
• Is there a separate, longer notice period for your specific role — common for senior, safeguarding-critical or finance roles?
• Is your pay period monthly, four-weekly or weekly? This is what determines the length of your notice under paragraph 15.2.
• Is there a written authority for deductions from your final pay, for example to recover overpaid term-time-only salary or unreturned equipment?
• Are you employed by the local authority, the governing body, an academy trust, or a contractor? This determines which set of terms applies at all.
• If you transferred under TUPE, are you on protected terms that differ from your newer colleagues'?

The School Support Staff Negotiating Body, and what is actually coming

Any current guide to support staff terms has to address the SSSNB, because a good deal of published material writes about it as though it were already operating. It is not.

The School Support Staff Negotiating Body is intended to be a national negotiating body specifically for school support staff in England, dealing with pay, terms and conditions, training and career progression for a group that has historically been bargained for as part of the wider local government workforce rather than in its own right. The relevant provisions of the Employment Rights Act 2025 have not been commenced; secondary legislation is required to constitute the body; and formal establishment is planned for autumn 2026.

It is worth being clear-eyed about what the SSSNB is likely and unlikely to change. Its stated focus is pay, terms and conditions, training and career progression — the areas where support staff pay and grading have diverged widely between authorities and trusts. Whether notice periods feature at all, and whether any eventual national framework moves support staff towards or away from the Green Book's pay-period model, is genuinely unknown at this stage. Anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.

How to resign properly

The mechanics are simpler than on the teaching side, largely because there is no deadline to miss, but the same basic discipline applies.

Putting it together

The core finding on this page is simple and, as far as we can tell, poorly covered anywhere else: school support staff and teachers in the same building follow entirely different notice systems, and the support staff one is pegged to the payroll cycle rather than the school calendar. Green Book paragraph 15.2 requires the ordinary period from one pay period to the next — around a month for most people — while the statutory floor under section 86(2) of the Employment Rights Act 1996 is only a week, and the teachers' term-end deadlines do not apply to support staff at all.

That combination means two different mistakes are possible, and both are common. Giving a week's notice because that is the statutory minimum is a breach of contract. Assuming you are locked in until the end of term because your teaching colleagues are is a needless constraint on your own career. The corrective for both is the same: read the notice clause in your own contract, and if it is unclear, get HR to confirm in writing what it means before you need to act on it.