School Converting to an Academy: What Happens to My Pay?

Academy conversion is one of the few events in a teaching career that arrives with a formal legal process attached and almost no plain-English explanation of what it means for you personally. You will hear a great deal about governance, funding agreements, trust boards and due diligence, and comparatively little about the only questions most staff actually have: does my salary change, does my pension change, and can they make me sign something.

The short version is that the law is more protective than the rumour mill suggests on the transfer date itself, and less protective than people assume about everything that comes afterwards. This guide separates those two things carefully, because conflating them is the single most common source of both unnecessary panic and misplaced complacency. It covers conversion of a maintained school into a new single-academy trust, conversion into an existing multi-academy trust, and — since the mechanics are identical — a school moving from one trust to another.

What conversion actually is, legally

A maintained school does not "become" an academy in the sense of changing a label. What happens is that a new legal entity — an academy trust, which is a company limited by guarantee and an exempt charity — enters into a funding agreement with the Secretary of State under the Academies Act 2010, and the school is then run by that trust instead of by the local authority or the existing governing body. The maintained school closes as a legal entity and the academy opens, usually on the first day of a month.

That matters for your pay because it means your employer changes. In a community or voluntary controlled school, your employer is the local authority. In a foundation, voluntary aided or trust school, it is the governing body. In either case, on the conversion date that employer ceases to employ you and the academy trust starts to. Every question in this guide flows from that single fact.

The process has a number of formal stages, and staff are typically told about it somewhere between stage two and stage three — which is usually later than they would like and, on the Department for Education's own guidance, later than it should be.

TUPE and the conversion date

The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 — TUPE — are the reason conversion day is far less dramatic for your payslip than it sounds. Regulation 4(1) provides that a relevant transfer does not terminate the contract of employment; instead the contract transfers, and takes effect afterwards "as if originally made between the person so employed and the transferee". Regulation 4(2) transfers all of the old employer's rights, powers, duties and liabilities under that contract to the new one.

Three consequences follow, and they are worth stating individually because each one answers a question staff routinely ask.

First, it is automatic. Nobody signs anything. You do not have to accept the transfer, agree to it, or apply for your own job. It happens by operation of law at midnight on the conversion date whether every party wants it to or not. A trust cannot pick and choose which staff to take, and a local authority cannot retain staff it would prefer to keep.

Second, the contract moves across unchanged. Not "broadly similar", not "equivalent" — the same contract, with the same terms. Your salary, your pay point, your TLR, your SEN allowance, your part-time fraction, your working pattern, your notice period, your leave entitlement, your sick pay scheme and your contractual reference to the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document and the Burgundy Book all continue to apply.

Third, your continuity of employment is preserved. Your start date with the trust is your original start date. This is not a technicality: it determines your redundancy entitlement, your qualifying period for unfair dismissal, your contractual notice, your occupational sick pay entitlement and your occupational maternity pay entitlement. Academies are also listed as related employers under the Redundancy Payments (Continuity of Employment in Local Government, etc.) (Modification) Order 1999, so service continues to count if you later move between academies or back into local authority employment.

The provision that does the real work is regulation 4(4): "Any purported variation of a contract of employment that is, or will be, transferred by paragraph (1), is void if the sole or principal reason for the variation is the transfer." There is no time limit attached to this. It is not a twelve-month protection or a two-year protection. A change made three years after conversion whose real reason is still the conversion is still void. That is a genuinely strong protection, and it is much stronger than the folklore version ("TUPE protects you for a year") that circulates in staffrooms.

What transfers, and what doesn't

TUPE is broad but not unlimited, and the exceptions are worth knowing precisely rather than approximately.

The pension exclusion in regulation 10 is the one that causes unnecessary alarm every time a conversion is announced, so it is worth dealing with head-on. TUPE does not protect occupational pension rights in the way it protects pay, and in a private sector transfer that is a real and serious gap. In a school conversion it is not, because the gap is filled by dedicated pensions legislation that puts academies inside both public sector schemes automatically. That is covered in the next section and in much more depth in our companion guide on academy conversion and the Teachers' Pension Scheme.

The other frequently misunderstood category is liabilities. If you had a live grievance, a pending pay appeal, an unresolved discrimination complaint or an outstanding claim against the local authority, that liability transfers to the trust along with your contract. You do not lose a claim because your employer changed mid-process. This is exactly why the Commercial Transfer Agreement contains indemnity clauses — the trust wants the local authority to pay for anything that happened before conversion — but that allocation is between the two institutions and does not affect your right to pursue the claim against your current employer.

Your pension on conversion day

For teaching staff, the answer is short: nothing happens. Schedule 1 of the Teachers' Pension Scheme Regulations 2014 lists employment as a teacher in an academy, a city technology college, or by a multi-academy trust, as pensionable employment without election. The trust does not apply to join the TPS and cannot decline to participate; it registers as a TPS employer, takes over the administration, and your membership continues seamlessly across the conversion date.

That means no break in pensionable service, no effect on your accrued career average benefits, no effect on any final salary benefits you hold in the 1995 or 2007 sections, and no effect on the final salary link that carries your old benefits forward to your salary at retirement. Because there is no break at all, the five-year break rule that can sever the final salary link simply never comes into play.

For support staff, the parallel protection is in Schedule 2 Part 1 of the Local Government Pension Scheme Regulations 2013, which lists academy proprietors as scheduled bodies. A scheduled body is automatically an LGPS scheme employer and must offer scheme membership to every eligible employee. Teaching assistants, cover supervisors, technicians, administrative staff and site staff therefore stay in the LGPS through conversion in exactly the same way teachers stay in the TPS.

What the academy can do afterwards

This is the part that actually matters over a career, and it is the part that conversion consultations tend to skate over with reassuring language about how "nothing will change".

Until 2026, the legal position in England was stark. The School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document is made under Part 8 of the Education Act 2002 and applied to maintained schools. Academy trusts sat outside it. A trust was free to write its own pay policy, invent its own pay ranges, decline to pass on the national pay award, restructure TLRs, set its own progression criteria, and design its own conditions of service including directed time. Most trusts chose to mirror the STPCD closely, because the labour market gave them little choice and because their staff had transferred on STPCD terms in the first place — but that was a choice, not an obligation.

The crucial distinction is between your existing contractual terms, which TUPE protects, and future discretionary decisions, which it does not. A few examples make the line concrete:

• Your current salary is a contractual term. It transferred, and it cannot be reduced because of the transfer. If you were on M5 on 31 August, you are on M5 on 1 September at the same cash figure.
• Next September's pay award is not. Whether the trust applies the national uplift to its own pay ranges was, before the 2026 Act, a decision for the trust — and a trust that declines to pass one on is not breaching your contract, it is exercising a discretion your contract gives it.
• Pay progression is a hybrid. Your right to be considered for progression under a pay policy, and the fairness obligations attached to that process, can be contractual. The outcome of the assessment is a judgement, and the criteria are set by the pay policy the trust adopts.
• An existing TLR you hold is contractual. A restructure that removes the post the TLR attaches to is a different matter, and that is an organisational change requiring its own process — consultation, redundancy or redeployment considerations, and usually safeguarding of pay for a period.
• Directed time is contractual if the STPCD is incorporated in your contract. This is the single biggest divergence in practice. A teacher who transferred with the STPCD incorporated keeps the 1,265-hour limit across 195 days; a teacher recruited by the same trust afterwards, on the trust's own contract, may not have it at all.

That last point produces the most awkward consequence of conversion, and it is worth naming plainly: over time a converted school tends to end up with two populations of staff on different terms — transferred staff carrying protected STPCD and Burgundy Book entitlements, and newer staff on the trust's own contract. Trusts find this administratively painful and frequently want to harmonise. TUPE makes harmonising downwards difficult, and Acas is explicit that harmonisation for administrative convenience is not by itself a valid reason to vary terms. The realistic routes a trust has are to ask staff to agree, to offer something in exchange, or to wait for turnover. Waiting for turnover is, in practice, the most common strategy.

What changed in 2026: the statutory pay floor

The framing above — "academy trusts are not bound by the STPCD" — was accurate for fifteen years and is now, for the first time, being dismantled. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. Section 59 and Schedule 3 amend Part 8 of the Education Act 2002 to bring academy teachers inside the statutory pay framework, and section 59 together with most of Schedule 3 commenced two months later, on 29 June 2026.

Two distinct things are being introduced, and they are on different timetables:

• A minimum pay floor. A new power lets the Secretary of State set, by order, a minimum level of remuneration for academy teachers, referenced to the STPCD pay ranges. Where the order applies and a contract provides for less, the order overrides the contract. The power has been available since 29 June 2026; academies are only actually required to pay at or above the floor once an order is made, which the Department for Education has said will be no earlier than September 2026.
• A duty to have regard to the whole STPCD. Academies will be required to have regard to the STPCD in setting pay and conditions — which the DfE glosses as meaning they must follow it unless they have good reason not to. This part commences separately by regulations, after the School Teachers' Review Body has been remitted to recommend changes to the STPCD and those changes have been consulted on and made.

The government's own framing is "a floor with no ceiling", and a government amendment during the Bill's passage confirmed that only a minimum is being set. Trusts that pay above the national scale — and a small number do — are not being forced to unwind those arrangements. Nobody's pay is being cut by this legislation.

Alongside the pay measures, representatives of academy trusts have been added to the list of statutory consultees the STRB and the Secretary of State must consult in the annual pay round, and a separate provision extends the requirement to hold qualified teacher status to teachers in academies. The detail, the exact commencement position and what remains discretionary are all set out in our dedicated guide to the academy pay floor under the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, which is the page to read if the legislation is your main interest.

Pay portability inside a trust

A question that comes up constantly once a school is inside a multi-academy trust: if I move to another school in the same trust, does my pay move with me?

The honest answer is that there is no statutory right to pay portability anywhere in England, inside a trust or outside one, and has not been since 2014. The STPCD used to require schools to match a teacher's existing pay point on appointment. That requirement was removed as part of the same reforms that ended automatic incremental progression, and since then a school recruiting a teacher has been free to appoint them at any point on the relevant range. Many schools and trusts write portability into their own pay policies voluntarily — it is a sensible recruitment position — but it is a policy choice, not an entitlement.

Inside a MAT, this plays out in three distinct ways, and it is worth knowing which one applies to you.

The other portability question worth asking about a MAT is whether the trust operates a single pay policy across all its schools or lets each school run its own. Both models exist. A single trust-wide policy is generally better for you if you intend to move around the trust, and it is also the model most likely to survive contact with the new statutory framework. You can sanity-check any figure you are offered against the national scale on our 2026/27 teacher pay scales page, where the Main Pay Range currently runs from £34,069 at M1 to £46,940 at M6 outside London, and the Upper Pay Range tops out at £52,835.

What you can and can't be forced to accept

This is the practical heart of the matter, and the place where knowing the rules precisely is genuinely useful.

You cannot be required to sign a new contract. Your existing one transfers and continues to bind the trust. Trusts commonly issue new documentation after conversion, sometimes as a genuine administrative tidy-up and sometimes as an attempt to reset terms. Both look identical on the day they land in your pigeonhole. Read the document against your current terms before you sign anything, and pay particular attention to directed time, leave year, sickness scheme, notice periods, and whether references to the STPCD and Burgundy Book survive.

You cannot have your pay cut because of the transfer. Regulation 4(4) voids it, with no time limit.

You can be asked to agree to changes, and you can say no. Agreement genuinely given is a real route for an employer, and not every proposed change is sinister — a change that improves your terms is permitted outright. But agreement obtained by presenting a variation as a formality is fragile, and a variation you agreed to only because the transfer was happening is still vulnerable under regulation 4(4).

You can be subject to a genuine restructure. If the trust has an economic, technical or organisational reason entailing changes in the workforce — a real staffing restructure, a change in the shape of provision, a redundancy situation — it can act on it, with consultation and process. The threshold is meaningful: it requires a change in the workforce, in numbers or in functions, not merely a desire for simpler paperwork.

Collectively agreed terms can be varied after a year — but not downwards overall. Regulation 4(5B), which applies to transfers taking place on or after 31 January 2014, permits variation of terms incorporated from a collective agreement where the variation takes effect more than one year after the transfer and the contract taken as a whole is no less favourable to you than before. This is the provision trusts actually use for harmonisation, and the fight is almost always over what "no less favourable, taken as a whole" means in practice. It is not a licence to trade a pay rise for the loss of directed time protection and call it neutral.

You can object to transferring, but it is rarely a good idea. Regulations 4(7) and 4(8) mean an objecting employee does not transfer — their contract terminates on the transfer date and they are treated as not having been dismissed. No notice, no redundancy payment, no claim. Objection is not a way of staying with the local authority, because your post no longer exists there.

Regulation 4(9) is the provision that is actually useful. Where a transfer involves or would involve a substantial change in working conditions to your material detriment, you may treat the contract as terminated and are regarded as having been dismissed. That gives you a route to an unfair dismissal claim rather than simply walking away with nothing. It is fact-specific, the threshold is genuinely substantial, and you should not resign in reliance on it without taking union advice first.

The consultation you should get

There are two entirely separate consultations around a conversion, and they get confused with each other constantly.

The Academies Act consultation is about whether the school should convert at all. Section 5 of the 2010 Act requires the governing body to consult "such persons as they think appropriate", which is about as weak as a statutory consultation duty gets. There is no prescribed format, no prescribed duration, and no requirement to follow the outcome. Staff and parents frequently, and understandably, find this inadequate.

The TUPE consultation is a different and considerably harder-edged obligation, owed under regulation 13 to representatives of affected employees — recognised unions where they exist, elected representatives where they do not. The employer must inform representatives of the fact of the transfer, when it will happen, the reasons for it, the legal, economic and social implications for affected employees, and any "measures" it envisages taking. Where measures are envisaged, it must consult with a view to reaching agreement. Separately, regulation 11 requires employee liability information to be given to the incoming employer at least 28 days before the transfer. The DfE's guidance recommends a consultation period of not less than 30 days for conversions.

A 2024 amendment to TUPE now allows employers to consult affected employees directly, without electing representatives, where the employer has fewer than 50 employees or the transfer involves fewer than 10 — but only where there are no existing representatives or recognised union. Most schools have more than 50 staff and a recognised union, so this rarely changes anything in a conversion. It can matter for a small outsourcing of a handful of staff, which is exactly the situation it was designed for.

Questions to ask before conversion day

These are the questions that turn a reassuring consultation meeting into information you can actually rely on. Ask them in writing and keep the answers.

• What is the conversion date, and who is my employer from that date? The name of the legal entity, not the name of the school.
• Will the trust adopt the STPCD, or its own pay and conditions framework, for staff recruited after conversion? This determines whether the school ends up with two tiers of terms, and it is the question with the longest-running consequences.
• Does the trust operate a single pay policy across all its schools, or does each school set its own? Ask for the current pay policy document and check its review date.
• Will the annual national pay award be applied automatically? A trust that intends to follow the STPCD in practice should have no difficulty saying so in writing.
• Does the trust apply the 1,265-hour directed time limit across 195 days to new appointments? If the answer is no, or is evasive, that is the most significant divergence from national conditions you are likely to encounter.
• What are the trust's arrangements for pay progression, and who decides? Whether decisions sit with the headteacher, a trust-level panel, or the board changes how the process feels in practice.
• Is any "measure" envisaged under TUPE regulation 13? List the categories explicitly in the question rather than asking the general version.
• Confirm TPS and LGPS arrangements and the new employer references. Both are guaranteed by legislation, but administrative handover errors at conversion are common; check your first academy payslip carefully.
• Confirm my continuous service date in writing. It should be your original start date, not the conversion date. This is the single most common data error at conversion and the easiest to fix early.
• Is any outsourcing of support services planned, now or in the foreseeable future? A separate question with separate and more serious pension consequences for support staff.
• Which unions does the trust recognise, and under what agreement? Recognition does not automatically survive every transfer in every form, and it materially affects how future changes get negotiated.

A well-run trust will answer every one of these without difficulty, and several of them are questions it should be volunteering. Persistent vagueness about pay policy, directed time or recognition is itself informative — not proof of bad faith, but a reasonable prompt to ask again more precisely.

Sources and accuracy

The TUPE analysis on this page is based on the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 as amended, in particular regulations 4, 10, 11 and 13, together with Acas guidance on changing employment contracts after a TUPE transfer and the 2024 amendments to the consultation rules made by the Employment Rights (Amendment, Revocation and Transitional Provision) Regulations 2023, which apply to transfers taking place on or after 1 July 2024. The conversion process follows the Department for Education's published guidance on converting to an academy, including its guidance on transferring responsibilities to the academy trust, and the Academies Act 2010. Continuity of service between academies and local authorities reflects the Redundancy Payments (Continuity of Employment in Local Government, etc.) (Modification) Order 1999.

Pension statements reflect Schedule 1 of the Teachers' Pension Scheme Regulations 2014 and Schedule 2 Part 1 of the Local Government Pension Scheme Regulations 2013. The legislative changes described are from the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 (c. 21), which received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026; the commencement analysis follows section 78 of that Act and the Department for Education's published policy summary notes, which state that the minimum remuneration requirement will apply no earlier than September 2026 and that the duty to have regard to the STPCD will commence no sooner than that. Pay figures are the confirmed 2026/27 STPCD figures effective from 1 September 2026.

This page is independent guidance for orientation, not legal, employment, financial or pensions advice, and it is not affiliated with the DfE, Teachers' Pensions, any local authority, any academy trust or any trade union. TUPE disputes are highly fact-specific and the outcome frequently turns on details of your particular contract and the particular transfer. If you are facing a conversion and something you are being told does not match what is here, your union is the right place to take it — and the right time to take it is before the conversion date, not after.