Academy Transformation Trust Teacher Pay (2026/27)

Academy Transformation Trust does not fit the pattern of most trust profiles on this site. It is not a trust that advertises a pay premium, publishes its own scale, or features in reporting about above-average teacher salaries. What it does feature in, twice over a decade apart, is reporting about job cuts — and once, briefly and embarrassingly, about the gap between an executive's expense claims and the cuts the trust was simultaneously asking staff to accept. This page sets out the pay position as it actually is — standard national rates, as far as the public record shows — and then sets out that history clearly, because anyone applying to an ATT school in 2026 deserves to know both halves.

Everything below is built from ATT's own job adverts on the DfE's Teaching Vacancies service, the trust's published financial statements, the government's Financial Benchmarking and Insights Tool, and contemporaneous reporting from Schools Week, Education Uncovered and the Channel 4 Dispatches and Observer investigation into academy trust expenses. Where a figure could not be independently confirmed, that is stated rather than smoothed over.

What Academy Transformation Trust actually is

Academy Transformation Trust was established on 14 November 2011 by Ian Cleland, as part of a wider "Transformation Trust" network associated with Sir David Bell, a former Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education. It is a charitable company limited by guarantee, headquartered at Emmanuel Court in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham.

The trust's current size, per the government's Financial Benchmarking and Insights Tool for the 2024–25 financial year, is 21 academies plus a further education college. The trust's own recruitment material describes it as serving approximately 12,500 learners across roughly ten local authority areas in the West Midlands, East Midlands and East of England. Confirmed local authority areas include Walsall and Sandwell, Nottinghamshire, and Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex — the trust's Essex schools include Kingsmoor Academy in Harlow and The Hathaway Academy in Grays. The mix spans primary, secondary, special and post-16 provision, which is a wider phase range than most of the London-focused trusts covered elsewhere on this site.

That last figure matters more here than it would for most trusts. ATT has changed chief executive four times since 2018 — Debbie Clinton, Sir Nick Weller, an interim period under Derek Trimmer, and now Mark McCourt, who took over on 1 April 2025. Leadership turnover of that pace is itself a sign of an organisation that has spent much of the last decade managing difficulty rather than growth, and it is the thread that connects the two redundancy stories covered later on this page.

No distinct scale: standard MPS and UPS

Some multi-academy trusts profiled on this site have built their own pay architecture — United Learning's PT and EPT bands, or Harris Federation's flat allowance on top of the national scale. We looked for the same at Academy Transformation Trust and did not find it. Every live vacancy we reviewed on the DfE's Teaching Vacancies service quotes pay against the standard national Main Pay Range (M1–M6) and Upper Pay Range (U1–U3), described in adverts in exactly that form — for example, one listing for a Teacher of Maths post at Sutton Community Academy in Nottinghamshire is explicitly banded "MPS 1-6".

A second, more technical signal points the same way. ATT's organisation listing on Teaching Vacancies shows several posts marked "Pending Pay Award" — wording used when a school or trust has not yet applied that year's School Teachers' Review Body uplift to its adverts. A trust running its own bespoke scale, independent of the national pay round, would have no reason to describe a vacancy that way; only a trust that is waiting on the government's own annual announcement would. Taken together, the adverts and the "pending" language are consistent evidence that ATT sets pay by reference to the national STPCD structure rather than a trust-specific one.

What live vacancies actually show

Live adverts are the most reliable evidence available for any trust that does not publish its own pay policy, and ATT does not appear to publish one — we searched and found no standalone teachers' pay policy document on the trust's own website. Recent postings give a workable, if imperfect, picture. A Teacher of Mathematics post at Sutton Community Academy in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, advertised a salary of £30,000 to £46,525, spanning the main and upper ranges for a school outside London and the fringe. An older listing for a fixed-term Class Teacher post at North Walsall Primary Academy quoted £23,720 to £29,488 across points M1–M4 — a figure that predates several years of national pay awards and is included here only to show the trust's banding convention, not as a current rate. More recent 2026 listings for class teacher and science teacher posts group salaries in a £32,916 to £45,352 range on the MPS 1–6 scale.

None of those figures should be read as a single, current, trust-wide rate — they are individual adverts posted at different times, for different regions and different points on the scale, and school-level pay progression at academies is legally a matter for each academy's own resourcing rather than a nationally fixed timetable. What they consistently show is a trust operating comfortably inside the standard national bands rather than outside them, which is the more important finding. Set any live ATT advert next to the current national M1–M6 and UPS figures — M1 at £34,069, M6 at £46,940, U3 at £52,835 for 2026/27 — before treating a headline number in an advert as unusual in either direction.

Pay progression and TLRs

We could not find a published Academy Transformation Trust pay or appraisal policy setting out how progression decisions are made, which points of the main and upper range are used as entry points, or how performance review feeds into an annual pay decision. That is a genuine gap compared with a trust like United Learning, which publishes a detailed, dated pay policy with named progression criteria. In the absence of a trust document, the safest working assumption is that ATT follows the standard STPCD approach — annual review against the Teachers' Standards, with progression decisions made at individual academy level — but this is an inference from the absence of evidence to the contrary, not a confirmed fact, and we would rather say that plainly than imply certainty we do not have.

On allowances, nothing in ATT's public material suggests it varies from the standard national Teaching and Learning Responsibility (TLR) ranges or the SEN allowance that apply across the maintained and academy sectors alike — see our TLR payments guide for the current national bands. No ATT-specific TLR figures were found in any advert reviewed for this page, which is itself unremarkable: many schools state TLR availability only in the full job pack rather than the headline advert.

The pension: standard Teachers' Pension Scheme

Qualified teachers at any state-funded school in England, academy or maintained, are enrolled in the Teachers' Pension Scheme by law — academy status carries no exemption, and we found nothing in ATT's material suggesting any departure from that position. ATT's own adverts tend to describe pension provision in general terms — phrases like "a generous pension scheme" appear more often than the words "Teachers' Pension Scheme" spelled out — and direct staff to the trust's Viv-Up staff benefits platform for the fuller detail, which is a third-party benefits portal rather than pension administration itself.

Support staff, including central-office and finance roles, are more commonly enrolled in the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) instead, which is standard sector-wide practice for non-teaching staff and is referenced in ATT's own central-team vacancy adverts. If you are moving into a support or non-teaching role at the trust, confirm which scheme applies — the LGPS and TPS have materially different contribution rates and accrual structures, covered in our guide to academy conversion and pensions.

Beyond salary: benefits and development

ATT's recruitment material is more detailed on professional development than on pay itself, which is a consistent pattern across the adverts we reviewed.

• Viv-Up staff benefits platform — covering a health cash plan, shopping discounts, a cycle-to-work scheme, gym memberships and cinema tickets, alongside an employee assistance programme.
• The ATT Institute — the trust's internal professional development structure, referenced in adverts as offering continuous self-development opportunities for teaching staff.
• 42 Leadership Development Pathways — a figure the trust quotes directly in its own recruitment copy, positioned as evidence of internal progression routes across a 21-academy network.
• A stated trust mission — ATT describes its aim, in its own words, as meeting "young people where they are at" and refusing "to leave them there", under what it brands its ATT2030 vision.

None of this is unusual for a trust of this size, and none of it substitutes for the pay and job-security questions covered in the rest of this page — but a genuinely structured internal development offer is a real part of any total package, and worth asking about directly at interview if you are weighing an ATT post against a similarly-paid maintained school role.

2016: cost-cutting and an expenses scandal

This is the older of the trust's two documented redundancy stories, and it is worth setting out in full because the two halves of it — the cuts and the expenses — landed within weeks of each other and were reported together at the time.

In March 2016, ATT announced it needed to find £500,000 in savings, stating that "the education sector is facing a number of significant financial challenges across the country" and that it was "essential" to review costs "without impacting on the quality of education." By early May 2016, Schools Week reported that more than 100 support staff across the trust's then 21 academies in the Midlands and East of England had been told they faced losing their jobs or having to reapply for them, in some cases on lower pay grades and covering wider geographical areas. Unison, which represented many of the affected staff, put the potential job losses at up to 32 and said the trust had given "no meaningful consultation," with its national officer Jon Richards describing the decision as having "come as a bolt from the blue."

The expenses story broke less than three months later. A joint Channel 4 Dispatches and Observer investigation into executive spending across England's 40 largest academy trusts — which together had spent more than £1 million on expenses since 2012 — singled out ATT's then chief executive, Ian Cleland, who was paid £180,000 a year. The trust had leased him a Jaguar XJ Premium Luxury V6, with the insurance jointly held with his wife; Cleland's own claims included roughly £3,000 for servicing the car and buying new tyres, and a further £3,000 on first-class rail travel and meals at upmarket restaurants, reportedly including a bill of £471 at a Marco Pierre White restaurant and £703.45 at Bank. Schools Week covered the findings the same day, 25 July 2016, as part of its wider reporting on academy executive pay and expenses.

An Education Funding Agency investigation followed, publishing its findings in March 2017 and identifying multiple breaches of the Academies Financial Handbook, including conflicts of interest connected to founder-controlled board appointments. Cleland was suspended by the trust's chair at the time, Stephen Tilsley, then reinstated — and his first action on returning was reported to have been removing the chair who had suspended him, with another trustee resigning shortly afterwards.

The 2025 redundancy drive

This is the lead the standing brief for this page asked us to verify, and it checks out as real, current, and distinct from the 2016 episode above — not a case of old reporting resurfacing.

On 16 May 2025, Education Uncovered's Warwick Mansell published a report headlined "Another major academy trust in large scale redundancy drive", describing Academy Transformation Trust as being "in the midst of plans to make more than 10 teachers and possibly scores of support staff redundant," across at least 11 of its schools. The trust "appears to have been under pressure... to address a financial deficit," with redundancies affecting both central and school-based staff. The article's full text sits behind Education Uncovered's subscription paywall, so the detail available to us is limited to what is stated in the published preview and headline — a real constraint on how far this section can go, which is why we are naming it directly rather than filling the gap with inference.

What the preview does establish, and what is worth noting specifically, is that ATT's approach differed in one respect from a broadly comparable 2026 redundancy announcement at Harris Federation covered elsewhere on this site: Education Uncovered's reporting notes that, unlike Harris, ATT went through "a formal consultation process at trust level with its staff unions," and included its own central operations within the scope of the cuts rather than confining them to individual schools. Both of those are more constructive practices than a trust could be forced into, and are worth setting against the scale of the numbers involved.

Financial history: deficit, recovery, and renewed pressure

The 2025 redundancy drive is easier to understand against the trust's longer financial history, which has been genuinely volatile rather than steadily difficult.

By February 2018, ATT was reported to be running a deficit of around £2.5 million. Debbie Clinton, who became chief executive that year, is credited with a substantial financial turnaround: by the end of 2019 the trust's position had moved to a reported £2 million surplus. That is a genuinely large swing for a trust of this size to manage in under two years, and it should be read as a point in the trust's favour — a demonstrated capacity to recover from serious financial difficulty, not just to fall into it.

What the 2025 reporting suggests, without giving us the detail to be more precise, is that financial pressure has returned in some form since then. That is consistent with sector-wide conditions rather than necessarily a trust-specific failure: falling pupil rolls in parts of the Midlands and East of England, the general funding squeeze covered across this site's guide to why academy trusts are making teachers redundant in 2026, and — for the 2026/27 pay award specifically — a national funding settlement in which schools are expected to absorb roughly the first percentage point of the 3.5% uplift themselves rather than receiving it fully funded by central government. None of that excuses a redundancy process for the staff going through it, but it does mean ATT's 2025 pressure should be read in the context of a genuinely difficult period for school funding generally, not assumed to be evidence of continued mismanagement from the 2016–17 era.

What we couldn't verify

Academy Transformation Trust publishes less about its own employment terms than several other trusts covered on this site, so being explicit about the gaps matters.

• Well evidenced: the trust operates the standard national MPS and UPS scale rather than its own, based on multiple live job adverts and the "Pending Pay Award" listing convention.
• Well evidenced: the 2016 restructuring, the Channel 4/Observer expenses investigation, and the 2017 EFA governance findings, from contemporaneous Schools Week and Unison reporting.
• Well evidenced: the 2018 deficit and the 2018–2021 recovery to surplus under Debbie Clinton.
• Well evidenced: the May 2025 redundancy drive was reported by Education Uncovered and covers at least 11 schools and more than 10 teaching posts, though the underlying article sits behind a paywall.
• Well evidenced: the trust's current scale (21 academies plus an FE college) and approximate pupil numbers, from the DfE's own Financial Benchmarking and Insights Tool and the trust's recruitment material.

• Not found: any published Academy Transformation Trust teachers' pay policy, appraisal policy or directed time / conditions of service document.
• Not found: a confirmed outcome to the May 2025 redundancy consultation — how many of the "at risk" posts were actually lost, and whether any were resolved through redeployment.
• Not found: independent employee review data (Glassdoor, Indeed) specific to Academy Transformation Trust in sufficient volume to report a reliable figure.
• Not verified: the exact number and location of all ten local authority areas the trust operates in — we could confirm six by name (Walsall, Sandwell, Nottinghamshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex) but not the remaining four.
• Not verified: whether the trust's pension provision for teaching staff is branded or administered any differently from standard TPS membership — adverts describe it generically rather than by name.

ATT and the academy pay floor

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 requires academies to have regard to the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) and to meet a statutory minimum pay floor set by reference to it. The commencement detail matters and is widely misreported: Section 59 and Schedule 3 commenced on 29 June 2026, which gives the Secretary of State the power to make a minimum remuneration order, but academies are only bound once that order is actually made — which the Department for Education has said will happen no earlier than September 2026, and which had not happened at the time of writing. A government amendment during the bill's passage confirmed the Act sets a floor, not a ceiling.

For a trust already paying the standard national scale, like Academy Transformation Trust appears to on the evidence gathered for this page, the pay floor should change essentially nothing: a trust that already tracks the STPCD by construction clears a floor set by reference to the STPCD without needing to adjust anything. The live question for ATT is less about the pay floor and more about the conditions side of the same Act, and about whether the trust's financial position stabilises enough that the 2025 redundancy process does not recur. Watch this trust's financial statements and Ofsted history rather than its pay rates for signs of what is coming next.

How to check before you apply

Because ATT publishes relatively little about its own employment terms, and because it has a documented recent history of financially-driven job cuts, the questions below are worth asking directly rather than assuming the advert tells you everything.

• Ask which specific point on the Main or Upper Pay Range you are being offered — not just "MPS" or "UPS", which each cover a spread of many thousands of pounds.
• Ask whether this school was affected by the May 2025 redundancy consultation, and if so, what the outcome was and whether any further restructuring is expected.
• Confirm the pension in writing — the Teachers' Pension Scheme for a teaching post, or the Local Government Pension Scheme if the role is support or central-team based.
• Ask for the trust's current financial position — the most recent published financial statements are a matter of public record and will show whether the deficit reported in 2025 has been addressed.
• Ask about the school's pupil roll trend. Falling rolls are the single most common driver of academy redundancy processes nationally, and a school with a stable or growing roll is a materially safer bet than one with a shrinking one.
• Check a live vacancy on Teaching Vacancies rather than a cached job board listing, since ATT postings on secondary sites are sometimes long expired.
• Ask whether there is a recognised union rep at the school and, if so, speak to them — Unison and other unions have an established history of organising within this trust.

Once you have a specific offer, model what it is actually worth after tax, National Insurance and pension contributions with our take-home pay calculator, and if redundancy risk is a live concern at the school you are considering, our guide to teacher redundancy pay and redundancy pay calculator set out what you would actually be entitled to.