What Changes for Teachers in January 2027 (Employment Rights Act 2025)

What changes, and what does not

The clearest way into this is a table that separates three categories which are constantly conflated: things that change on 1 January 2027, things that have already changed, and things that are widely reported as changing but have not commenced.

Section 25: the six-month qualifying period

Section 25 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 is short. Subsection (1) states that Part 10 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 — the unfair dismissal Part — is amended in accordance with subsections (2) and (3). Subsection (2) amends section 108, the qualifying period provision: in subsection (1), for "two years" substitute "six months", and in subsection (2), for "two years" substitute "six months". Subsection (3) simply says: omit section 124, the limit on the compensatory award. Subsection (4) makes a consequential change to the regulation-making power in section 209, and subsection (5) introduces Schedule 3, which contains the minor and consequential amendments.

Section 108(1) as it currently stands provides that section 94 — the right not to be unfairly dismissed — does not apply to the dismissal of an employee unless they have been continuously employed for a period of not less than two years ending with the effective date of termination. From 1 January 2027 that reads "six months".

Commencement is handled by SI 2026/559. Regulation 3 brings section 25 into force, so far as not already in force, on 1 January 2027, together with Schedule 3 to the same extent, subject to the transitional and saving provisions in regulation 4. Section 25(5), the technical subsection introducing Schedule 3, had already been commenced for specified purposes on 1 July 2026 by regulation 2 of the same instrument.

Schedule 3 is worth a look because it shows how thoroughly the drafters worked through Part 10. It reduces the qualifying period in section 92 — the right to be given a written statement of reasons for dismissal — from two years to six months, so that the two rights stay aligned. It strips references to the now-repealed section 124 out of sections 117, 118, 123, 209, 226 and 236, and out of section 34 of the Employment Relations Act 1999 and section 15 of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which between them handled the indexation and adjustment of the compensation cap. It adjusts section 205A on employee shareholder status. It is, in short, a careful sweep through everything in Part 10 that depended on either the two-year figure or the cap.

What Schedule 3 conspicuously does not do is touch section 155. That is the observation the rest of this page is built on.

There is no statutory probation scheme — that proposal was dropped

This section exists because the single most common error in current guidance on the January 2027 changes is describing a scheme that does not exist in the enacted law.

When the Employment Rights Bill was introduced in 2024, the government's stated policy was to make protection from unfair dismissal a day-one right, removing the qualifying period altogether. To make that workable for employers, the Bill proposed a statutory probationary period — referred to in the policy papers as the "initial period of employment" — during which an employee would have unfair dismissal rights but a lighter-touch statutory process would apply to dismissals for capability, conduct and similar reasons.

That scheme did not survive the Bill's passage. The House of Lords insisted on a qualifying period, and what emerged in the Employment Rights Act 2025 as passed is the far simpler change described above: a straight substitution of "six months" for "two years" in section 108. There is no statutory initial period in the Act, no statutory light-touch procedure, and no separate dismissal regime for new starters.

The practical consequence for schools is that contractual probationary periods carry more weight than before, not less. A school that runs a six-month probationary period and makes its decision in month five is operating inside the qualifying period; one that runs a twelve-month probation and makes its decision in month ten is not. Nothing in the legislation dictates either approach, but the arithmetic has changed, and staff in their first year should expect probationary processes to become more structured and more promptly concluded as a result.

The trigger is the effective date of termination, not the date of notice

Regulation 4 of SI 2026/559 is the transitional provision, and it settles a question that would otherwise have caused a great deal of argument around the turn of the year.

Regulation 4(1) provides that the amendments made by section 25(2) and (3) of, and the listed paragraphs of Schedule 3 to, the 2025 Act (a) have effect in any case where an employee is dismissed before 1 January 2027 but the effective date of termination falls on or after that date, and (b) do not have effect in any case where the effective date of termination falls before 1 January 2027. Regulation 4(2) confirms that "dismissed" and "the effective date of termination" carry the meanings they have in Part 10 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 — sections 95 and 97 respectively.

Two further points follow that are easy to miss. First, section 97 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 contains provisions that can extend the effective date of termination for certain purposes by the statutory minimum notice under section 86 where the employer gave less notice than the statute requires. That can, in principle, push an effective date of termination across the 1 January boundary in a case where it would otherwise have fallen just short — a technical point, but a live one for anyone dismissed with short notice in late December 2026.

Second, the same logic applies with real force to fixed-term contracts, because the effective date of termination there is the expiry of the term. A fixed-term teaching contract expiring on 31 August 2027 is comfortably on the new side of the line, which is why the change matters so much for fixed-term staff. Our guide to fixed-term teaching contracts explains why non-renewal is a dismissal in law in the first place.

The two-tier gap: unfair dismissal at six months, redundancy pay at two years

Here is the finding that, as far as we can establish, almost nobody is currently setting out clearly, and it has direct financial consequences for school staff on short contracts.

Section 155 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 provides that an employee does not have any right to a redundancy payment unless they have been continuously employed for a period of not less than two years ending with the relevant date. Section 155 sits in Part 11 of the Act, which deals with redundancy payments — a different Part from the unfair dismissal provisions in Part 10.

Section 25 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 amends Part 10. Schedule 3 to the same Act works through the consequential two-year and section 124 references across Part 10 and several other statutes. Neither touches section 155. The two-year qualifying period for a statutory redundancy payment therefore survives the January 2027 changes entirely intact.

The result is a genuine structural gap. From 1 January 2027, there is a band of service — from six months up to two years — in which an employee has the right not to be unfairly dismissed, the right to a written statement of the reasons for their dismissal, and access to an uncapped compensatory award if the dismissal was unfair, but no entitlement whatsoever to a statutory redundancy payment if the reason for the dismissal was redundancy.

For a teacher or support staff member in that band, a redundancy is therefore a curious hybrid. The process becomes legally examinable in a way it previously was not: was there a genuine redundancy situation, was the selection pool and criteria fair, was there meaningful consultation, were alternative posts considered? Those questions now have teeth from six months' service. But the payment that most people associate with redundancy — the statutory lump sum — is not payable at all until two years.

It is worth being clear that this gap is not obviously an oversight. There is a coherent policy case for treating the right not to be dismissed unfairly — a procedural and dignity-based protection — differently from a service-related severance payment. But whether deliberate or not, it is a real feature of the law as it will stand from January, it has not been widely flagged, and school staff on short or fixed-term contracts are among the groups most exposed to it.

Working the gap through with real numbers

An illustration makes the shape of it concrete. Take a teacher appointed on a fixed-term contract from 1 September 2026, covering a post funded by a grant that is not renewed, whose contract accordingly expires on 31 August 2027 without renewal. Assume a gross salary around £34,000, which is roughly £654 a week.

Two things stand out. The first is how much the change is worth to this teacher: they move from having essentially no remedy at all to having a claim with an uncapped compensatory award, which in a case where the process was genuinely defective is a very substantial shift. The second is that the statutory redundancy payment — the thing most people expect when a post is cut — remains resolutely £0.

For context on what they would have received with two years' service: the statutory redundancy calculation uses a week's pay capped at £751 from 6 April 2026 under the Employment Rights (Increase of Limits) Order 2026 (SI 2026/310), applied to reckonable years with age-banded multipliers, up to a maximum of twenty years. The same order raised the compensatory award cap to £123,543 — a figure that becomes irrelevant for terminations from 1 January 2027, when section 124 is repealed. Our teacher redundancy pay guide sets out the full calculation, including how local authority and academy trust discretionary schemes can improve on the statutory minimum.

Who in schools this actually affects

The reduction from two years to six months sounds abstract until you map it onto the groups in a school who routinely sit inside that band.

• Early career teachers. An ECT in the second year of induction who is dismissed will, from January, have the service to bring an ordinary unfair dismissal claim — which they generally would not have had before. Induction outcomes and capability processes for ECTs become more consequential for schools as a result.
• Fixed-term and maternity-cover teachers. The largest single beneficiary group, because non-renewal is a dismissal and most cover contracts run a year or less. A twelve-month contract not renewed now sits comfortably above the qualifying period.
• Teachers in their first two years at a new school. Continuous employment is with the employer, so moving school generally resets the clock — a teacher with fifteen years' experience but eight months at a new trust previously had no unfair dismissal protection there at all, and from January will have.
• Support staff on short or externally funded contracts. Teaching assistants attached to a named pupil's funding, tutoring and intervention staff, and project-funded roles all cluster in the six-months-to-two-years band.
• Anyone caught in a trust restructure. Central-team reorganisations and multi-school restructures frequently affect staff with under two years' service in their current post, who now gain a route to challenge the process even where they receive no statutory redundancy payment.
• Staff in their probationary period. Where a contractual probation runs beyond six months, the employee acquires unfair dismissal rights before the probation ends — a combination that will push many schools towards shorter, better-documented probation.

Worth stating plainly: nobody loses anything on 1 January 2027. Everyone who had unfair dismissal rights before still has them, and a large group who did not now do. The only qualification is the one this page has laboured — the gain is in the right to challenge a dismissal, not in a right to be paid off.

The compensation cap disappears

The repeal of section 124 gets less attention than the qualifying period change but is, for a minority of cases, worth considerably more money.

Section 124 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 currently limits the compensatory award for unfair dismissal to the lower of a fixed cash figure and 52 weeks' gross pay. The cash figure is uprated annually: from 6 April 2026 it is £123,543, set by the Employment Rights (Increase of Limits) Order 2026 (SI 2026/310), up from £118,223. In practice the 52-weeks-of-pay limb is the binding one for most school staff, whose salaries sit well below the cash cap — so a teacher on £45,000 is effectively capped at around £45,000 of compensatory award however large their actual loss.

Section 25(3) of the 2025 Act omits section 124 entirely, with effect for dismissals whose effective date of termination falls on or after 1 January 2027. The compensatory award then becomes uncapped, and is governed by section 123 alone — such amount as the tribunal considers just and equitable having regard to the loss sustained by the complainant in consequence of the dismissal so far as that loss is attributable to action taken by the employer.

Not yet in force: the NDA provisions on harassment and discrimination

Section 24 of the Employment Rights Act 2025 is frequently reported as being in force. It is not, in the sense that matters, and the detail is worth setting out because several commercial trackers give a misleading impression.

Section 24(2) inserts a new section 202A into the Employment Rights Act 1996, headed "Contractual duties of confidentiality relating to harassment and discrimination". Its core provision is that any provision in an agreement between an employer and a worker — whether a worker's contract or not — is void in so far as it purports to preclude the worker from making an allegation of, or a disclosure of information relating to, relevant harassment or discrimination, or an allegation or disclosure relating to the employer's response to such conduct or to the making of such an allegation or disclosure.

That would be a substantial change for schools, where settlement agreements containing confidentiality clauses are a routine feature of the resolution of grievances and capability disputes. But section 202A is still shown as prospective on the legislation as published.

The distinction between commencing a power to make regulations and commencing the operative rule is exactly the kind of technicality that produces incorrect summaries. Practically: if you are asked to sign a settlement agreement containing a confidentiality clause covering a harassment or discrimination allegation today, the new section 202A does not currently void it. Take advice on the agreement on the law as it stands, and note that existing statutory protections for protected disclosures under Part 4A of the Employment Rights Act 1996 — which since 6 April 2026 expressly include disclosures about sexual harassment — operate independently of section 202A and are already in force.

Separately, the reforms are not expected to apply retrospectively to agreements already entered into. Anyone weighing up whether to sign now or wait should treat that as a live consideration and take advice rather than assume the position either way.

Not yet in force: the School Support Staff Negotiating Body

The SSSNB is the other provision routinely described as though it were operating. It is not, and the timeline matters for anyone in a school support role trying to plan.

The body is intended to be a national negotiating body for school support staff in England, covering pay, terms and conditions, training and career progression — a group that has historically been bargained for as part of the wider local government workforce under the NJC "Green Book" rather than in its own right. The relevant provisions of the Employment Rights Act 2025 are uncommenced, secondary legislation is required to constitute the body, and formal establishment is planned for autumn 2026.

• The SSSNB does not yet legally exist. The establishing provisions have not been commenced and the constituting secondary legislation has not been made.
• Nothing about your current terms has changed. School support staff continue under existing arrangements for the 2026-27 financial year.
• No pay outcome before 2027/28 at the earliest. The first improvements to support staff contracts flowing from SSSNB negotiations are expected from the 2027-28 financial year at the earliest, and the body is not expected to reach agreement on pay before then.
• The Green Book still governs. Until any SSSNB outcome is agreed and given effect, the NJC agreement and your individual contract remain the operative documents — including for notice periods.

Our guide to notice periods for school support staff sets out what the Green Book currently requires and how it differs from the teachers' position.

Already changed: employment tribunal time limits

One change has already landed and is easy to overlook because it arrived before the January headline. Section 152 of the Employment Rights Act 2025, together with Schedule 12, extends the time limit for bringing most employment tribunal claims from three months to six months, applying where the act or failure to act complained of falls on or after 1 October 2026.

For school staff this is genuinely useful, because the three-month limit has always sat awkwardly with the school year. A dismissal effective on 31 August previously had to be brought by the end of November, in the middle of the autumn term, and frequently before an internal appeal had concluded. Six months gives real breathing room to take advice, exhaust internal processes and make a considered decision.

What to do before January

Most of the useful preparation is administrative and takes very little time.

Putting it together

Three things are worth carrying away. The qualifying period for unfair dismissal halves and then halves again, from two years to six months, for anyone whose employment ends on or after 1 January 2027 — with the trigger being the effective date of termination, not the date notice is given. The compensatory award becomes uncapped at the same moment. And statutory redundancy pay does not move at all, leaving a band of service between six months and two years in which a dismissal is challengeable but a redundancy payment is simply not payable.

Against that, two widely reported changes have not actually commenced: the provisions voiding confidentiality clauses over harassment and discrimination allegations, which are expected some time in 2027, and the School Support Staff Negotiating Body, which does not yet legally exist and whose first pay outcomes are not expected before 2027/28. Being clear about what has and has not happened is, in a fast-moving area like this one, more valuable than any amount of forecasting.