Why Academy Trusts Are Making Teachers Redundant in 2026

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For most of the academy programme's history, the financial health of your employer was not something a classroom teacher needed to think about. Funding arrived per pupil, pupil numbers went up, and pay awards were largely funded by the department that set them. Redundancy was something that happened when a school closed or amalgamated.

That has changed, and it has changed fast enough that the sector's own data has not caught up with it. This guide sets out what the published figures actually say — including where the most widely repeated version of them is wrong — what mechanically happens inside the Department for Education when a trust runs out of money, and what a teacher can realistically check, ask and rely on. It is deliberately specific about what is evidenced and what is not, because a lot of the commentary in this area is neither.

What the data actually shows

There are two authoritative public sources on academy trust finances, and it is worth knowing which is which, because they measure different things and they are published years apart.

The first is the Department for Education's Academies consolidated annual report and accounts, the audited, sector-wide set of books covering every academy trust in England. The most recent edition covers 1 September 2023 to 31 August 2024 and was not published until April 2026 — a lag of roughly twenty months, which is the single most important thing to understand about sector financial data. By the time the audited picture is public, the year it describes is two academic years gone.

The second is the DfE's financial benchmarking and insights tool, which publishes trust-level figures — revenue reserves, in-year balance, cost breakdowns against comparable trusts — considerably faster. It is the source behind the 2024-25 deficit numbers quoted everywhere, and it is free, searchable and the single most useful thing on this list for an individual teacher.

Schools Week's analysis of the 2024-25 benchmarking data, published on 30 April 2026 under the headline "A tale of two trusts", found 83 trusts running 293 academies in deficit, representing 3.9 per cent of all academy chains. Fifty-six of those 83 — 67 per cent — were single-academy trusts, and only ten ran more than nine schools. The seven trusts more than £1 million in the red included St Ralph Sherwin Catholic MAT at £9.2 million, the Arthur Terry Learning Partnership at £8.4 million, Brooke Weston Trust at £3.4 million, Salvatorian SAT at £1.2 million and Cotswold Beacon at just under £1.2 million. Thirty trusts moved the other way, into surplus.

Two different deficit numbers, and why they disagree

This is where a great deal of published commentary goes wrong, including some that circulates in staffrooms, so it is worth being precise.

There is a second source of confusion. The accountancy network Kreston, whose annual academies benchmark report is widely quoted, measures in-year position — did the trust spend more than it received this year — across a sample of trusts it audits. On that measure, 37 per cent of trusts recorded an in-year loss in 2024-25, down from around 60 per cent the year before. The DfE benchmarking figure of 83 measures overall position at year end. A trust with healthy accumulated reserves can post an in-year loss without being anywhere near a deficit; a trust with a cumulative deficit can post an in-year surplus while it recovers. Both statements can be true at once, and quoting one as though it disproves the other is a common error.

The practical takeaway for a teacher is narrow but useful. When you look a trust up on the benchmarking tool, you will see both numbers. Revenue reserves tells you the accumulated position — the hole, if there is one. In-year balance tells you whether this year made it bigger or smaller. A trust with negative reserves and a positive in-year balance is digging itself out. A trust with positive reserves and a large negative in-year balance is on the way in. St Ralph Sherwin, for the record, reported revenue reserves of minus £9,199,000 and an in-year balance of minus £3,311,000 for the year to 31 August 2025: a deep hole, still getting deeper.

Why staff costs exploded

The single most striking figure in the 2023-24 sector accounts is the staff cost line. Total staff costs across the academy sector rose from about £27.9 billion to £31.1 billion in one year, an increase of 11.5 per cent. The DfE attributes it to a combination of a larger sector (more academies, more pupils in academies as conversions continued) and pay awards, of which the 2023 award of 6.5 per cent was by far the largest recent one.

Three further findings from the same accounts matter more to a teacher than the headline. The number of trusts whose auditors raised a going concern warning — a formal statement that there is material uncertainty about the organisation's ability to keep operating — rose from 32 to 75. The number of compulsory redundancy packages agreed across the sector rose from 1,220 to 1,431, with the cost of them rising from £14 million to £18 million. And the DfE provided £18.5 million of additional financial support to trusts in difficulty, split between £14.4 million non-repayable and £4.1 million repayable.

Read together, those three numbers describe a sector where distress is becoming normal rather than exceptional, and where the state is increasingly acting as lender of last resort to individual employers. That is the environment in which the redundancy consultations of 2025 and 2026 have been run.

The four pressures squeezing trust budgets

Trusts announcing redundancies in 2025 and 2026 have been remarkably consistent about why. The Harris Federation's statements name all four; so do the Confederation of School Trusts' own survey findings, in which more than 80 per cent of trust chief executives named budgets as their biggest barrier, 53 per cent named falling rolls as an immediate financial risk, 46 per cent named SEND costs and 37 per cent named teacher salaries.

1. Pay awards that are only partly funded

This is the pressure teachers are least likely to have seen described accurately, because it is genuinely counter-intuitive: a pay rise for teachers can shrink a school's budget.

On 1 July 2026 the government confirmed a multi-year settlement — 3.5 per cent from September 2026 and a further 3 per cent from September 2027, with unqualified teachers on the lowest point getting 5 per cent. It is backed by £700 million in 2026-27 and £1.1 billion in 2027-28. But as Schools Week reported at the time, under the headline "Teacher pay to rise 3.5% in 2026, but it's not fully-funded", schools are expected to fund roughly the first 1 per cent of each award from existing budgets, plus draw on 0.8 per cent of identified "headroom". Across teaching and support staff awards combined, the NEU estimated schools would need to find around £460 million from budgets that were not increased to provide it. Education secretary Bridget Phillipson's position was that schools, "like the rest of the public sector", must "play their part".

The mechanics matter. Because the STPCD award applies to every teacher on the pay scale, and because staffing is roughly three quarters of a school's spend, an unfunded 1 per cent on pay is not a 1 per cent problem. It is closer to a 0.75 per cent hit on the total budget that has to be found from the remaining quarter — the part that also pays for energy, catering, maintenance, resources and everything else. The arithmetic only resolves in two places: fewer staff, or reserves. The 2025 award had the same structure, which is why the Harris Federation explicitly blamed "unfunded" pay rises when it opened its first redundancy consultation in May 2025.

Our 2026/27 pay award tracker sets out what the award is worth on each pay point, and the 2026/27 pay scales page has the confirmed figures.

2. Falling pupil rolls

Almost all school funding follows pupils. Fewer pupils, less money — regardless of how well the school is run, and with costs that do not fall proportionately, because a class of 24 needs the same teacher as a class of 30.

The National Audit Office quantified this in April 2026. It projected 56,300 fewer primary pupils in 2027 than in 2026, worth roughly £288 million less for primary schools in that year alone, with further falls in 2028 (80,200 fewer pupils, around £410 million less) and 2029. Demand for primary places fell 3 per cent between 2018/19 and 2024/25, with a further 7 per cent fall forecast by 2030, and unfilled places rose from 10 per cent to 14 per cent. Around 400,000 fewer pupils are expected in England's schools by the end of the decade.

That demographic wave is now working through into secondary intakes, which is why the 2026 consultations have started to hit secondary teaching posts rather than primary support staff. The Harris Federation's April 2026 consultation — 44 teachers and 29 support staff at risk across 12 secondary schools — was explicitly attributed to London's falling rolls, with individual schools facing shortfalls of up to £800,000 and Year 7 demand in inner London projected to drop 7.6 per cent over four years. David Ross Education Trust opened its own limited consultations across roughly a third of its 36 schools for the same reason, despite holding £8.5 million in reserves.

3. Employer National Insurance

From April 2025, employer National Insurance contributions rose from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent, and the threshold at which employers start paying fell from £9,100 to £5,000. For an organisation whose costs are overwhelmingly payroll, that is a substantial and entirely unavoidable increase.

The government provided more than £1 billion to cover it, of which £930 million went to mainstream and high-needs settings for April 2025 to March 2026. School leaders reported that it did not cover the cost. Union evidence at the time described shortfalls ranging from around 10 to 35 per cent of the increase, with some trusts reporting gaps of up to 20 per cent. A partially funded statutory cost increase behaves exactly like a partially funded pay award: it lands on the staffing budget.

4. SEND and non-pay costs

The fourth pressure is the least well quantified and, in many trusts, the fastest-growing. Rising numbers of pupils with education, health and care plans, combined with high-needs funding that has not kept pace and local authority dedicated schools grant deficits, push cost onto individual schools — additional teaching assistant hours, specialist provision, external services. Nearly half of trust chief executives named SEND costs as a financial risk in the CST's survey. Energy, catering, insurance and premises costs have all risen well above the funding uplift over the same period.

This is also the pressure with the most direct staffing consequence, and the cruellest one. SEND pressure is absorbed largely through support staff hours — and support staff are the first thing cut when a trust restructures. Both of the East Midlands trust disputes in 2026 turned on exactly this contradiction.

What actually happens when a trust runs a deficit

This process is published, and almost nobody outside trust finance teams has read it. The DfE's Financial support and oversight for academy trusts guidance sets out the escalation ladder, and the Academy Trust Handbook sets out the obligations. Knowing the sequence tells you roughly how much trouble your employer is in, and how much warning you are likely to get.

Why a trust deficit is not the same as a school deficit

A teacher moving between the maintained and academy sectors, or weighing up a trust job against a local authority one, should understand that these are structurally different situations with different risks in both directions.

The redeployment point is the one worth holding onto, because it is the single practical advantage of trust employment in a redundancy situation and it is frequently overlooked. Before compulsory redundancy, an employer is expected to have made reasonable efforts to identify suitable alternative roles. In a multi-academy trust, "the employer" means all of its schools. If you are put at risk, ask in writing for the trust-wide vacancy list, not just your school's.

Two live examples on this site

Abstract sector data is only so useful. Two trusts profiled on this site illustrate both ends of what a deficit can turn into, and both are unusually well documented.

The Arthur Terry Learning Partnership is the severe end. A deficit that roughly doubled to £8.4 million, a 2024 notice to improve, £3.5 million of government loans drawn down, restructuring proposals the NEU said would cost around 100 jobs, nine days of strike action across 20 schools in January 2026 with nine more announced, the resignation of the entire strategic leadership — chief executive, chief finance officer, chair, finance committee chair and two further trustees — and then, in May 2026, an education secretary's decision to transfer all 24 academies to other trusts. The redundancy consultations were withdrawn under the January settlement. The trust is being wound up anyway.

St Ralph Sherwin Catholic Multi Academy Trust is the largest deficit in the country and a different shape of crisis: £9.2 million in the red, two notices to improve three years apart, more than 40 compulsory redundancies proposed across 14 of its 25 schools, teaching posts and responsibility payments in scope alongside deep cuts to support staff pay, and strike action by both the NEU and UNISON running from March to July 2026. That trust remains intact, with an acting chief executive, a recovery plan and a settlement with its unions. Its profile sets out what is verified about teacher pay there, and — just as importantly — what is not.

The consultation trap most teachers miss

Here is a genuinely important technical point that applies specifically to multi-academy trust employees and is almost never explained.

Statutory collective redundancy consultation — the 30-day and 45-day minimum periods, the duty to consult recognised unions, the duty to notify the Secretary of State — is triggered where an employer proposes to dismiss 20 or more employees at one establishment within a 90-day period. The operative words are "at one establishment".

A trust proposing 40 redundancies spread across 14 or 15 schools may not reach 20 at any single school. On a strict reading, the statutory collective consultation duty is not triggered at all, even though the trust is cutting a substantial share of its workforce, and even though it is a single legal employer. In practice, recognised unions will push hard for trust-wide collective consultation, trusts will often agree to it voluntarily to avoid dispute, and the case law on what constitutes an "establishment" is more nuanced than the bare wording suggests. But it is not a guarantee, and the difference between a voluntary trust-wide process and a statutory one is the difference between a courtesy and an enforceable right.

What is and isn't protected in a trust redundancy

The legal position is more settled than the commercial one, and it is worth separating what you can rely on from what is negotiable.

• The redundancy must be genuine. A redundancy exists where there is a real reduction in the need for employees to do work of a particular kind. If the role continues and the trust simply wants someone else in it, or the real issue is performance, that is not redundancy and a different process applies.
• Selection criteria must be objective and consistently applied. Where some but not all staff in a role are at risk, the trust must use fair, transparent criteria. Selecting union representatives for redundancy is unlawful where the reason is their trade union activity — an allegation the NEU made specifically during the St Ralph Sherwin dispute.
• Consultation must be meaningful. Genuinely open to changing the outcome, not an announcement dressed as a discussion. This applies to individual consultation regardless of whether the collective thresholds are met.
• Redeployment must be explored first. In a trust, that means across the trust's schools, not just yours. Ask for the full vacancy list in writing.
• Employees on maternity leave get priority. They must be offered any suitable alternative vacancy ahead of other at-risk employees, without competing for it.
• Statutory redundancy pay is a floor. Two years' service minimum, calculated on age bands and capped years of service and weekly pay. Your actual entitlement may be considerably higher under Burgundy Book-referenced or trust-specific terms — see our redundancy pay guide.
• TUPE applies on a transfer between trusts. Your contract, pay point, continuity of service, contractual allowances and Teachers' Pension Scheme membership all carry across. Transfer-related dismissals are automatically unfair absent an economic, technical or organisational reason. Our TUPE guide covers the detail.

• Trust-level policies are not contractual terms. Automatic pay progression commitments, appraisal arrangements, recruitment incentives, CPD entitlements and flexible working practice are policy positions. They can be consulted on and changed, and they do not survive a transfer the way contractual terms do.
• Collective consultation is not automatic in a trust-wide cut. See the establishment point above. A trust can lawfully run a large trust-wide reduction without triggering the statutory regime if it stays below 20 at each school.
• There is no protection against your school being top-sliced to service another school's deficit. Central charges are a trust board decision.
• Academy trusts are not required to adopt Burgundy Book redundancy terms. Some mirror them; some sit close to the statutory minimum. There is no default you can assume.
• A settlement does not bind the trust forever. The Arthur Terry settlement paused consultations; the trust was broken up four months later. Agreements resolve the dispute in front of you, not the financial position underneath it.

How to check a trust's financial health before you join it

All of this is free, public and takes about twenty minutes. Do it before you accept an offer, and do it again if you are weighing up whether to stay.

What's verified and what isn't

This site's convention is to separate what is on the public record from what is inference, so that you can weigh the two differently.

• Well evidenced: the 2024-25 deficit figures — 83 trusts, 293 academies, 3.9 per cent of all trusts, seven above £1m against four the prior year, 67 per cent single-academy trusts — from DfE financial benchmarking data as analysed by Schools Week on 30 April 2026.
• Well evidenced: the £27.9bn to £31.1bn staff cost rise, the going concern warnings rising from 32 to 75, the 1,431 compulsory redundancy packages and the £18.5m of DfE support — all from the DfE's own Academies consolidated annual report and accounts 2023 to 2024.
• Well evidenced: the partial funding of the 2026/27 and 2027/28 pay awards, including the first 1 per cent falling on school budgets, reported by Schools Week on 1 July 2026 and consistent with the DfE's own announcement.
• Well evidenced: the NAO's April 2026 falling rolls projections, and the Harris Federation and David Ross Education Trust consultations, all reported contemporaneously with named figures.
• Well evidenced: the DfE intervention ladder, because it is published guidance you can read yourself, as are the Academy Trust Handbook obligations and every individual notice to improve.

• Not yet available: audited sector-wide accounts for 2024-25 or 2025-26. The most recent consolidated report covers the year to 31 August 2024 and was published in April 2026. Everything more recent rests on benchmarking data and trade press.
• Not established: a sector-wide figure for teacher redundancies specifically. The 1,431 compulsory redundancy packages in the 2023-24 accounts are not broken down between teaching and support staff, and no reliable split exists in the public data.
• Not settled: the Employment Rights Act 2025 organisation-wide consultation threshold. The number has not been fixed and the provision is not in force. Treat any specific figure quoted for it as speculation until the regulations are made.
• Not verifiable in advance: whether an individual trust's stated recovery plan will work. Trusts publish recovery intentions; almost none publish the modelling underneath them, and the DfE does not publish its assessment of them.
• Contested rather than verified: the attribution of any particular trust's deficit to mismanagement rather than to funding. That distinction is frequently asserted in commentary on both sides and is rarely resolved by the published evidence.

One closing point of proportion. The redundancy wave is real, the funding squeeze behind it is real and the projections for pupil numbers make it very unlikely to ease before 2030. But 83 trusts in deficit means well over 2,000 that are not, and the great majority of teachers will go through this period without ever being put at risk. The purpose of reading a trust's accounts is not to frighten yourself out of a job you want. It is so that if you do take it, you take it knowing what the numbers say — and so that if a consultation ever does land on your desk, you already know what the process is meant to look like, and can tell when it doesn't.