Cabot Learning Federation Teacher Pay (2026/27)

Cabot Learning Federation is a useful trust to profile precisely because the headline claim that led us to look at it — that it runs a bespoke "CLF Grade" pay structure with figures like "CLF Grade 10" quoted for teaching posts — turns out to be only half right. CLF does run a genuinely distinctive internal pay structure of that name. It just does not appear to apply to classroom teachers, who are paid on recognisable national terms. Getting that distinction right matters more than repeating the headline, so this page sets out what we actually found, with the sources attached, rather than assuming the lead was correct.

Everything below comes from CLF's own website (clf.uk), its careers pages on eTeach, and live vacancy adverts on the Department for Education's Teaching Vacancies service, sampled across three pages of current and recently-expired listings. Where a figure is our arithmetic rather than CLF's own published statement, we say so.

What Cabot Learning Federation actually is

CLF began life as a soft federation between two Bristol secondaries, John Cabot Academy and Bristol Brunel Academy, from 2007, before formally becoming a single multi-academy trust in 2009 under its first chief executive, Sir David Carter — who later became England's National Schools Commissioner. The trust celebrated its ten-year anniversary in September 2019, at which point it had grown to more than 20 schools and around 12,000 pupils. CLF's current chief executive, per the trust's own "About us" page, is Sir Steve Taylor.

Using CLF's own academy finder at the time of writing, the federation now runs 37 academies: 18 primary, 11 secondary, 3 alternative provision, 2 specialist/special, 1 all-through, 1 post-16 provider and 1 studio school. It serves more than 18,000 children and young people aged 2 to 19, employs more than 3,000 staff, and is organised into five geographic clusters covering Bristol, South Gloucestershire, North Somerset, Gloucestershire and Somerset. Some other public reporting describes a slightly different split — around 36 schools, with 10 secondary and 17 primary rather than 11 and 18 — which is the sort of small discrepancy you would expect from a trust that has absorbed several schools in quick succession; the total in the mid-to-high 30s is the reliable part.

That geographic spread across five counties, rather than a single city, is worth noting because it means CLF's pay position is not uniform against a single local labour market the way Harris Federation's London-only estate is. A CLF teacher in central Bristol is competing for staff against a very different set of alternative employers than a CLF teacher in rural Somerset, and the trust's pay structure — a national scale for teachers, with no regional weighting visible in the adverts we checked — does not appear to vary by cluster.

Classroom teacher pay: the national scale, not a CLF scale

This is the central finding of this page, and it runs against the premise we started with. Multiple live and recently-closed classroom-teacher adverts on Teaching Vacancies quote salary ranges directly labelled with standard national point names:

• Class Teacher (EYFS), Priorswood Primary School, Taunton — advertised at "£32,916 – £37,101 (M1 to M3)".
• Teacher of Maths, Hans Price Academy — advertised at "£32,916 – £45,352", spanning the main range into the lower upper range.
• Head of Maths, Hanham Woods Academy — advertised at "£32,916 – £51,048 (M1 to UPS3)", plus "TLR 1B – £12,521" for the head-of-department responsibility.

Every one of those adverts labels the salary using the national point names — M1, M3, UPS3 — rather than any CLF grade or band name, and every one states that the post includes "access to the Teachers' Pension Scheme". There is no visible above-scale uplift of the kind advertised by United Learning ("5% above national scales") or Harris Federation (a flat £1,500–£2,000 allowance). On the evidence available to us, CLF pays classroom teachers the standard national rate and nothing more.

The TLR figure is also worth checking against the national ranges published elsewhere on this site. CLF's "TLR 1B" of £12,521 for a head-of-department post sits comfortably inside the national TLR1 range of £10,531–£17,819, which is a further sign that CLF is applying standard national figures rather than a bespoke internal one for this kind of post.

The CLF Grade system, and who it actually covers

CLF does run a real, distinctive internal pay structure called "CLF Grade" — we found it described in detail on the trust's careers pages on eTeach and confirmed individual grade labels on live Teaching Vacancies adverts. It is a genuine signal of a trust that has built its own pay architecture rather than relying entirely on national terms. What it is not, on the evidence we could find, is a pay structure for classroom teachers.

The lettered side of CLF Grade covers support and operational staff, running roughly as follows, based on the full-time-equivalent ranges published on CLF's eTeach careers hub:

• Grade Aii — around £25,949–£26,392 FTE. Example roles: lunchtime playworkers.
• Grade B — around £26,798–£29,208 FTE. Example roles: chefs, science technicians.
• Grade C — around £29,812–£32,138 FTE. Example roles: Level 2 teaching assistants, inclusion supervisors.
• Grade D — around £33,009–£36,011 FTE. Example roles: data analysts.
• Grade E — around £37,035–£40,958 FTE. Example roles: early years lead practitioners.
• Grade F — around £40,958–£43,697 FTE. Example roles: designated safeguarding leads.

A live example makes the pattern concrete. An Inclusion Supervisor post at Broadoak Academy was advertised as "CLF Grade C", with an actual (pro-rata) salary of £24,711–£26,640 and a full-time-equivalent range of £28,859–£31,111 — close to, though not identical to, the general Grade C band quoted on the careers hub, which is the kind of small variation you would expect between a general published structure and one specific live advert. The same advert confirmed the post carries the Local Government Pension Scheme rather than the Teachers' Pension Scheme, and a 37-hour working week, term-time only plus INSET days.

The numbered side of CLF Grade, described on the same careers hub as "Leadership Levels", runs from roughly L8 up to L24 and covers assistant principal and principal posts. Two live examples: an Assistant Principal post (at both Monkton Wood Academy and Broadoak Academy, at different times) advertised at £67,898–£76,772, and Principal posts at two different CLF secondaries — Lime Hills Academy in Nailsea and Brook Academy in Gloucester — both advertised at £82,654–£91,158. Both figures sit well inside the single statutory Leadership Pay Range that every English academy or maintained school leadership post must fall within, £53,586–£148,829 for the rest of England.

TLR and leadership pay in practice

Setting the CLF Grade leadership levels against the national Upper Pay Range gives a sense of the real premium on offer for staff moving from the classroom into school leadership at CLF. The top of the national Upper Pay Range for 2026/27 is £52,835. CLF's advertised Assistant Principal floor of £67,898 already sits some way above that, and its Principal ceiling of £91,158 is more than £38,323 above it. That is a meaningfully larger step up than the TLR system alone provides for staying in the classroom with responsibility — TLR1, the largest classroom-based responsibility payment, tops out at £17,819 on top of the base scale point, not on top of U3.

None of that is unusual — the gap between classroom pay and school leadership pay is a structural feature of the English system, not something specific to CLF — but it is worth having the actual CLF figures to hand if you are weighing whether to pursue a leadership route within the federation rather than staying as a subject specialist with a TLR.

Directed time and the 32.5-hour week

Several CLF classroom-teacher adverts state the working pattern as "32.5 hours per week", full time. That number is worth working through rather than skimming past, because it lines up closely with the statutory position. The national directed-time limit is 1,265 hours a year; divide that by a standard 39-week teaching year and you get approximately 32.4 hours a week — almost exactly the 32.5 hours CLF advertises.

That calculation is ours, not a figure CLF has published as such, and we could not find a dedicated CLF directed-time or conditions-of-service policy to confirm it formally. But the closeness of the two numbers is a reasonable indication that CLF's advertised classroom-teacher working pattern reflects the standard national directed-time limit rather than extending it — a genuinely different picture from Harris Federation, where an independent analysis found contracts requiring around 30 additional directed-time hours a year, and some individual schools running well beyond the statutory cap.

Pension: TPS for teachers, LGPS for support staff

This is one of the more clearly confirmed facts on this page. Every classroom-teacher advert we checked states directly that the post includes "access to the Teachers' Pension Scheme" — the standard career-average defined-benefit scheme covered in detail in our guide to the 2015 scheme. Support-staff adverts on the CLF Grade structure instead state access to "a generous pension through the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS)", which is the conventional split at the large majority of English academy trusts: TPS for anyone employed to teach, LGPS (administered by the relevant local authority pension fund) for support and operational staff. We found no sign of CLF running any alternative or opt-out pension arrangement of the kind United Learning proposed and then abandoned in 2025 — on the evidence available, CLF's pension position for both staff groups is entirely standard.

Digitech Studio School and vocational provision

CLF's most distinctive contribution to vocational and technical education is Digitech Studio School, a small school in Warmley, South Gloucestershire, for pupils aged 14 to 19, specialising in progression routes into the creative digital and high-tech sectors, with an intentionally small intake of around 90 students per year group. It joined the federation in 2015 and was formally opened by the Princess Royal in March 2017. CLF also runs Bristol Futures Academy, an alternative-provision academy for pupils who have struggled in mainstream education.

We want to be precise about what this does and does not establish. Studio schools and University Technical Colleges (UTCs) are both vocationally-focused institution types introduced in the same era of English education policy, both often backed by employer sponsors, and it would be an easy mistake to treat them as interchangeable. They are legally and administratively distinct, and CLF's own published material describes Digitech only as a studio school. We searched specifically for any CLF connection to a UTC and found none. If CLF has, or has had, a formal UTC sponsorship or partnership, we were not able to verify it from public sources, and we would rather flag that gap than assert a connection we cannot support.

On the training side, CLF also operates the CLF Institute, which leads the Boolean Maths Hub — one of the Department for Education's network of regional maths hubs — and runs a School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) provider. That is a genuine, verifiable piece of infrastructure for anyone considering CLF as a route into teaching via a school-based training route rather than a university-led PGCE.

The gender pay gap report

One piece of CLF's own published data is worth reporting on its own terms, because it is a genuine annual disclosure rather than a marketing figure. CLF's most recent gender pay gap report shows a mean gender pay gap of 18.95%, down slightly from 19.06% the previous year and from 20.68% four years earlier — a gradual but real narrowing over time. The same report states that women make up roughly three-quarters of CLF's total workforce, around two-thirds of staff in the upper pay quartile, and more than 80% of staff in the lowest pay quartile.

Read together with the CLF Grade structure above, that quartile split is consistent with a workforce where support and lower-graded roles — heavily female, per the trust's own figures — sit on the lettered CLF Grade bands, while a smaller, more male-skewed group occupies the highest-paid leadership levels. That is not unique to CLF; a similar pattern shows up across the schools sector nationally. It is nonetheless useful, verifiable context for anyone weighing a support-staff role against a teaching or leadership role at this specific trust.

Growth, five clusters, and what it means for staff

CLF's expansion from three founding academies in 2009 to 37 today has happened in identifiable stages, and the trust has been explicit about organising itself around geographic clusters rather than running everything from a single Bristol centre.

For a prospective employee, the practical effect of that structure is a trust genuinely too large to run pay and conditions from a single office in the way a five-school trust might, but organised into clusters small enough that day-to-day management, CPD and — per the CLF Institute — teacher training can be delivered fairly locally. Whether that translates into a good experience at any one specific school is, as with every trust profiled on this site, a question about that school rather than the federation as a whole.

What we couldn't verify

Being explicit about the gaps matters as much as reporting what we found, particularly on a page built to correct an initial assumption rather than confirm it.

• Well evidenced: classroom-teacher pay advertised directly against national M1–M6 and Upper Pay Range points, with standard-rate TLRs, across multiple live adverts.
• Well evidenced: the CLF Grade lettered structure (Aii–F) for support staff and numbered Leadership Levels (roughly L8–L24) for school leadership, both confirmed via CLF's eTeach careers hub and individual live adverts.
• Well evidenced: the TPS/LGPS pension split, stated directly on live adverts for each staff group.
• Well evidenced: the trust's size, cluster structure, founding history and Digitech Studio School, from CLF's own published pages.
• Well evidenced: the gender pay gap figures, from CLF's own annually published report.

• Not found: a published CLF teachers' pay policy, reward policy or conditions-of-service document of any kind.
• Not found: a "CLF Grade 10" or any numbered CLF grade applied to a classroom-teaching post, despite checking multiple pages of live and recently-expired adverts.
• Not found: any evidence of a current or past University Technical College partnership.
• Not verified: whether CLF's live advert figures already reflect the pending 2026/27 STPCD pay award, given that the national pay document had not been published at the time of research.
• Not verified: independent employee-review data (Glassdoor, Indeed) for CLF specifically — we could not access a usable public profile at the time of research, so we have not included a "what it's like to work there" review-score section on this page, unlike some other trust profiles on this site.
• Not verified: a specific "15 years" anniversary claim for 2025. CLF's own published history points to 2009 as its founding year and September 2019 as its confirmed ten-year anniversary, which would put a fifteen-year anniversary in 2024, not 2025 — we could not find CLF material confirming a 2025 fifteenth-anniversary celebration.

CLF and the academy pay floor

Under the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, academies will be required to have regard to the STPCD and to meet a statutory minimum pay floor set by reference to it, with the School Teachers' Review Body's remit extended to cover academies. Section 59 and Schedule 3 commenced on 29 June 2026, giving the Secretary of State the power to make a minimum remuneration order, but academies are only actually bound once that order is made — which the Department for Education has said will be 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 CLF specifically, this should be close to a non-event on the pay side. Because classroom teachers are already advertised directly against the national scale points rather than a discounted internal one, the trust should clear any statutory floor without needing to change its approach. The more interesting question, as with every academy trust covered on this site, is the conditions side — in particular the 1,265-hour directed-time limit, which the evidence on this page suggests CLF is already broadly observing, but which was carved out of the June 2026 commencement and awaits its own regulations, expected no sooner than September 2026.

How to check before you apply

CLF publishes less about its pay and conditions than the largest above-scale trusts, but the live adverts are more informative than at many comparable trusts. Before accepting a post, check the position for the specific school and role.

• Check the live advert's point labels, not just the headline salary. CLF's classroom-teacher adverts state the national point (e.g. "M1 to M3") directly — use that to compare against a maintained school offer using this site's 2026/27 pay scales guide.
• If you are offered a support or operational role, ask for the CLF Grade letter and the current FTE range. The lettered structure (Aii–F) is real but not identical across every advert we sampled — get the current figure for your specific post in writing.
• Confirm which pension applies. Teachers' Pension Scheme for teaching posts, Local Government Pension Scheme for support posts — both are standard, but get it confirmed for your specific role rather than assuming.
• Ask whether the STPCD 2026 pay award has been applied yet. Given the national pay document's late-2026 publication timeline, a CLF offer made before that point may need to be revisited once the new figures are confirmed and backdated to 1 September 2026.
• Ask to see the school's directed-time calendar. The 32.5-hour weekly figure on CLF adverts is a promising sign, but it is not a substitute for the actual calendar at your specific school.
• If pursuing a leadership route, ask which Leadership Level the post sits at and where that falls within the statutory Leadership Pay Range for the school's group size.
• Ask whether there is a recognised union rep at the school, and if the trust has any formal recognition agreement — we found no evidence either way in public sources.

You can model what any of these figures means in take-home terms with our take-home pay calculator, and check a TLR figure against the national range with our TLR calculator before treating an advertised allowance as the full picture.