School Changing Trust: Your Teachers' Pension

Multi-academy trusts change shape constantly. Trusts grow by taking on struggling schools, shrink when they hand schools away, merge with each other, or occasionally collapse and have every academy redistributed at once. For a teacher standing in the staffroom when one of these announcements lands, the pension question arrives almost instantly — usually right after "will I still have a job here" — and deserves a precise answer, not a reflexive "don't worry, it'll be fine."

The reassurance turns out to be correct, but it is worth understanding exactly why, because this is one of the most-searched and most anxiety-inducing questions in the entire academy sector, and a vague answer leaves room for the vague worry to persist. This page focuses specifically on the scenario that is now far more common across the sector than a first-ever conversion: an existing academy being transferred from one trust to another, generally called rebrokerage, plus the related case of a standalone single-academy trust joining an established MAT for the first time. If your school is converting from local authority maintained status to academy status for the very first time, that is a related but distinct question with its own dedicated page — see the academy conversion and pension guide — and this page does not repeat that ground.

The short answer

Two separate legal mechanisms do the work here, and it helps to keep them apart from the outset because they protect different things.

• Your Teachers' Pension continues without interruption, because TPS membership is a matter of statute attached to the job, not a benefit tied to your specific employer. This is true whether your school has one trust move or five over a career.
• Your employment itself transfers under TUPE — the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 — which is the separate mechanism that carries your pay, allowances, hours and continuous service across to the new trust intact.
• Continuity of service, preserved by TUPE, is what your redundancy pay calculation, your notice entitlement and your position on any years-of-service pay or sick pay scale are built from — so none of those reset either.
• What is not guaranteed is that every discretionary local perk your old trust offered will be replicated identically by the new one. Core statutory and contractual protections travel with you; genuine discretion does not have to.

The rest of this page works through each of those points in enough depth to actually answer the follow-up questions people have, rather than stopping at the headline reassurance.

Two different scenarios, and which one you're in

"My school is changing trust" covers at least two meaningfully different situations, and it is worth being clear which one applies to you before reading further, because the underlying legal analysis is the same in both but the real-world context differs a great deal.

Both are legally a "relevant transfer" for TUPE purposes, and both move you between two employers who are each, independently, statutory participants in the Teachers' Pension Scheme. That second point is the one doing the heavy lifting for your pension, and it is identical in both scenarios — which is why the rest of this page treats them together rather than as separate legal questions.

Why your TPS record survives the move

The mechanism is worth setting out precisely, because "it'll be fine" is not the same as "here is why it is fine," and teachers who have watched independent-sector colleagues lose Teachers' Pension access altogether have a perfectly reasonable basis for wanting the actual reasoning rather than reassurance alone.

The Teachers' Pension Scheme Regulations 2014 define pensionable employment by listing categories of employment, not by listing individually approved employers. Schedule 1 includes employment as a teacher in an academy, a city technology college, and employment by a multi-academy trust, as pensionable without election. That single design choice is what makes trust changes a non-event for pension purposes: participation is a property of the job and the setting, not a contract an individual trust has entered into and could later exit.

• Neither trust — outgoing or incoming — has a choice about participating. There is no application process, no acceptance, and correspondingly no withdrawal mechanism for either one.
• Your membership is one continuous record, not two. Teachers' Pensions treats the transfer date as a change of employer within your existing record, in exactly the same way it would record a voluntary move to a different school.
• Your accrued benefits are untouched, because they are a liability of the scheme itself, underwritten by government, rather than an asset sitting with whichever trust currently employs you.
• Anyone recruited by the new trust after the transfer is in the same position as you. The protection attaches to the employment, not specifically to staff who happened to transfer into it.

Because there is no gap in pensionable service at any point, none of the protections that genuinely do depend on an unbroken record are put at risk. That includes the final salary link for anyone with legacy 1995 or 2007 section benefits, which is broken only by a continuous break in pensionable service of more than five years — something a same-day change of employer, by definition, cannot create. Our guide to the 2015 career average scheme covers how that link interacts with your ongoing CARE benefits in full detail.

Contribution rates do not move either, for the same underlying reason. Your own contribution is set by six salary-banded tiers that apply identically across the whole scheme, and the employer contribution — 28.68% of pensionable pay since April 2024, falling to 17.68% from 1 April 2027 following the 2024 valuation — is fixed nationally and paid by whichever trust currently employs you. A trust change cannot alter either figure, because neither is something an individual employer sets.

TUPE: what actually protects you

Your pension survives a trust transfer through dedicated pensions legislation, as set out above — not through TUPE, which is a common point of confusion. TUPE actually excludes occupational pension old-age benefits from what transfers, under regulation 10 of the TUPE Regulations 2006. In a normal private-sector business sale that exclusion is a serious problem employers work around contractually. In a school-to-school trust transfer it does not matter, because Schedule 1 of the TPS Regulations already does that job by statute instead.

What TUPE does protect is everything else about your employment. Your contract transfers automatically under regulation 4(1), which provides that the transfer does not end your contract, and that it continues afterwards as though it had originally been made with the new trust. You are not a new starter who happens to have kept your old salary — you are treated in law as though you had always worked for the incoming trust.

• Your pay and pay point. The salary and scale point you were on the day before transfer carries across unchanged.
• Contractual allowances. TLR and SEN allowances, safeguarded pay and any other allowance that forms part of your contract transfer with you.
• Hours, working pattern and part-time fraction. Nothing about your contracted hours changes because of the transfer itself.
• Terms incorporated from national agreements, including the STPCD and, where your contract incorporates it, the Burgundy Book — the mechanism most maintained-school and many academy teachers rely on for sick pay and other service-related conditions.
• Continuous service, meaning your original start date, not the transfer date, remains the date everything service-related is measured from.
• Live liabilities, such as an unresolved grievance, an ongoing sickness process or a pay appeal already under way, which move with you rather than being lost.

It is just as important to be honest about what TUPE does not guarantee going forward, because overstating TUPE's permanence is almost as unhelpful as underselling it. Regulation 4(4) voids a change to your contract where the sole or principal reason for it is the transfer, and there is no time limit written into that rule. But the regulations also give an employer several lawful routes to change things afterwards: a genuine economic, technical or organisational reason entailing an actual change in the workforce; a variation clause already in your contract; an improvement to your terms; or, specifically for terms drawn from a collective agreement such as the STPCD or the Burgundy Book, a change made more than a year after the transfer provided your contract as a whole is no less favourable than before. Acas guidance is explicit that wanting to align different trusts' staff onto one set of terms purely for administrative convenience is not, on its own, a lawful reason — but a trust with a genuine restructuring case, or one willing to negotiate a package that leaves you no worse off overall a year or more down the line, does have a lawful route available. Our full TUPE for teachers guide goes through every one of these routes, the consultation rights that apply before a transfer, and the harmonisation fight that often follows one, in much greater depth than is useful to repeat here.

Continuous service beyond pay: redundancy, notice and sick pay

Pension and headline pay tend to dominate the conversation, but continuity of service quietly underpins several other entitlements that are just as valuable and just as fully protected by the same TUPE mechanism.

• Statutory redundancy pay. Calculated from age, complete years of continuous service (capped at 20 years) and weekly pay. Because TUPE preserves your original start date, a trust transfer never resets the service-years component of this calculation, and any more generous Burgundy Book or trust redundancy terms your contract already carried are similarly unaffected by the transfer itself.
• Contractual and statutory notice periods. Where notice is set by length of service — statutory minimum notice under the Employment Rights Act 1996 rises with continuous service, and many contractual notice provisions do too — your accumulated years continue counting exactly as before.
• Burgundy Book sick pay banding. Entitlement under the Burgundy Book scale rises with years of service, from 25 days' full pay in year one up to 100 days' full pay plus 100 days' half pay from the fourth year onwards. Where this scheme was already a genuine contractual term, your accumulated years of service carry across the transfer rather than resetting to zero with the new trust. Our Burgundy Book sick pay guide sets out the full scale and the four-month qualifying condition on the half-pay element.
• Belt-and-braces statutory backup. The Redundancy Payments (Continuity of Employment in Local Government, etc.) (Modification) Order 1999 separately lists academies as related employers for redundancy purposes, which reinforces continuity of service even in edge cases sitting outside a clean TUPE transfer.

The important qualification applies to sick pay just as it does to pay itself: this protection travels with terms that were genuinely contractual at the point of transfer. If your old trust's redundancy policy or sick pay scheme was a discretionary local enhancement rather than a contractual term, TUPE has less to bite on — the distinction covered next.

What can genuinely change: discretionary terms

It would be dishonest to present a trust transfer as having zero practical consequences, and this is the one area where that is not quite true. The dividing line runs between what is legally protected and what was always a matter of trust discretion.

The practical difficulty is that the line between "a discretionary benefit" and "a contractual term established by long-standing custom and practice" is genuinely disputed territory in employment law, and a benefit paid consistently for years can sometimes harden into an enforceable term even without ever being written down formally. If a specific enhancement mattered a great deal to you, it is worth checking your written contract, your staff handbook, and — if it is not clearly one or the other — asking your union rep for a view before assuming either that it is guaranteed or that it will disappear.

Two other things are worth naming honestly. First, a new trust's discretionary pay policy going forward — how it awards pay progression, how generous its TLR allocations are, whether it pays above the STPCD minimum scale — can differ meaningfully from your old trust's, and that affects your future pensionable pay even though it does not touch the scheme rules themselves: a trust that pays more builds a larger pension each year, and one that pays less builds a smaller one. Second, day-to-day working culture and expectations can feel different under a new trust for entirely ordinary organisational reasons that have nothing to do with TUPE.

A standalone academy joining a MAT for the first time

Everything above applies equally where your school is not moving between two established multi-academy trusts, but is instead a single-academy trust joining a MAT for the first time. Your school was already, independently, a statutory TPS employer before the join — becoming part of a larger trust does not change that status, only which legal entity is now responsible for administering it.

The pension analysis is identical to a rebrokerage: Schedule 1 makes the receiving MAT a TPS employer automatically, your record shows a change of employer with no break, and your accrued benefits and final salary link are unaffected. TUPE applies in the same way to your pay, conditions and continuous service. The practical texture of the change tends to differ, though. Moving from a small single-academy trust — often still using payroll, HR and pension administration arrangements set up around one school — into a MAT with dozens of academies usually means moving onto more standardised, centralised systems. That is frequently a genuine improvement in administrative reliability, but it is also exactly the kind of handover where a payroll error is most likely to originate, simply because more records are being migrated onto a new system at once.

What to check when your school changes trust

Since the pension and continuity protections here are genuinely strong, the only realistic risk left is administrative — a payroll handover error rather than a legal gap. It is worth spending ten minutes confirming the handover went cleanly rather than discovering a problem years later.

If something looks wrong

Almost everything that can genuinely go wrong at this stage is a payroll data problem rather than a Teachers' Pensions problem, and almost all of it is fixed fastest at the source.

• Raise it with the new trust's payroll or HR team first. A missing pension deduction, a wrong contribution tier, or a continuous service date showing the transfer date instead of your real start date are all payroll-level errors and are usually corrected quickly once flagged.
• Involve your union rep if the issue concerns a contractual term rather than a simple data error — particularly anything that looks like a discretionary change being introduced and justified by reference to the transfer, since that is precisely the situation TUPE's protections exist to address.
• Contact Teachers' Pensions directly through the member helpline or secure messaging in My Pension Online if payroll cannot resolve a pension-specific discrepancy, or if you want independent confirmation of what your record actually shows.
• Act promptly rather than waiting. Errors caught within the same financial year are routine to correct. Errors left for years can require reconstructing records that may no longer exist in the same detail.

Sources and accuracy

The statutory basis for Teachers' Pension Scheme membership in academies and multi-academy trusts is Schedule 1 of the Teachers' Pension Scheme Regulations 2014 (SI 2014/512), which lists employment as a teacher in an academy, a city technology college and by a multi-academy trust as pensionable without election. Contribution figures reflect Teachers' Pensions published rates: six member contribution tiers running from 7.4% to 12% for 2026/27, and an employer contribution rate of 28.68% (including the 0.08% administration levy) in force since April 2024, falling to 17.68% from 1 April 2027 following the 2024 valuation.

TUPE points reflect the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (SI 2006/246), in particular regulation 4 (transfer of contracts and the limits on post-transfer variation) and regulation 10 (exclusion of occupational pension old-age benefits). Guidance on what does and does not amount to a lawful reason for post-transfer change, including on harmonisation, reflects published Acas guidance on changing an employment contract after a TUPE transfer. Continuity of service for redundancy purposes across academies is reinforced by the Redundancy Payments (Continuity of Employment in Local Government, etc.) (Modification) Order 1999. Burgundy Book sick pay figures reflect the revised edition published in June 2023. The description of academy rebrokerage as requiring Regional Director agreement, and as typically arising from performance or governance concerns at the outgoing trust, reflects published Department for Education guidance on academy transfers; readers should note that Ofsted's inspection framework moved to a report-card model from autumn 2025, replacing the single-word overall judgements ("inadequate" and so on) that older commentary on rebrokerage often refers to.

This page is independent guidance for orientation, not financial, pensions, tax or legal advice, and is not affiliated with the DfE, Teachers' Pensions, any academy trust, any local authority or any trade union. TUPE outcomes in particular are fact-specific and can turn on the precise wording of an individual contract and the circumstances of a particular transfer. For a decision that matters, confirm your own record with Teachers' Pensions, take advice from your union, and treat anything genuinely uncertain in your own situation as a question for them rather than for a general guide like this one.