Creative Education Trust Teacher Pay (2026/27)

Most pages in this section exist because a trust does something unusual with pay — an above-scale uplift, a bespoke band structure, a proposed pension change, a documented industrial dispute. Creative Education Trust is included for closer to the opposite reason. Across live vacancy adverts, a union recognition agreement, and a contemporaneous NASUWT bulletin, the evidence we found is unusually consistent, and it consistently describes a trust doing the plain, unremarkable thing: paying the national scale that Parliament's own pay review body recommends, negotiated with recognised unions rather than imposed unilaterally.

That is worth a page precisely because it is not the story most people expect when they hear "multi-academy trust". Academy status gives a trust the legal freedom to set its own pay and conditions outside the STPCD, and a number of large trusts profiled elsewhere on this site use that freedom visibly. Creative Education Trust appears, on the public record, not to use it — at least not for classroom teacher pay. What follows sets out the evidence for that conclusion, what we could and could not verify, and the handful of things — a leadership change, a wide gender pay gap, a mixed Ofsted picture — that are genuinely distinctive about this trust and worth knowing before you apply.

What Creative Education Trust actually is

Creative Education Trust is a charitable multi-academy trust that, according to its own about-us page, was established in 2010 "to work in partnership with communities" in "England's post-industrial and coastal towns and cities" — a description that maps directly onto where its schools actually sit. Its Companies House registration is dated slightly later, April 2011, which is the ordinary gap between a trust being founded in practice and the legal entity being incorporated.

The network runs to 17 academies — 11 secondary and 6 primary, per the trust's own school directory — organised in three distinct geographic clusters rather than spread thinly across the country. The largest is around Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, where the trust runs five schools: Caister Academy, Lynn Grove Academy, Woodlands Primary Academy, and the Wroughton Infant and Junior academies. A second cluster covers the East Midlands — Abbeyfield School and Queen Eleanor Primary Academy in Northampton, The Bulwell Academy and Ellis Guilford School in Nottingham, The Milton Keynes Academy, and Weavers Academy and Wrenn School in Wellingborough. A third sits in the West Midlands — Ash Green School in Coventry, Harpfield Primary Academy and Thistley Hough Academy in Stoke-on-Trent, The Hart School in Rugeley, and Three Peaks Primary Academy in Tamworth.

That geography matters for a reason unrelated to trust policy: every Creative Education Trust school sits outside London and outside the London fringe area, so every post is paid on the plain national band of the STPCD rather than a fringe or London rate. For comparison, the illustrative national 2026/27 points used elsewhere on this site put M1 at £34,069, M6 at £46,940, and the top of the Upper Pay Range, U3, at £52,835 — see our full national pay scales guide for the complete structure. Nothing about Creative Education Trust's own arrangements, on the evidence we found, changes those figures.

On pupil numbers, the trust's own page states "over 13,500 children and young people". Third-party school-data sites vary a little either side of that — some round to roughly 14,000, and one figure circulating elsewhere puts it at around 14,500. We have used the trust's own stated figure as the primary one rather than picking whichever number sounded most precise, and we would treat the variation as ordinary movement in pupil rolls between snapshots rather than a live discrepancy worth chasing further.

The headline: plain national scale, no uplift

The single most important fact on this page is also the simplest to state: we found no evidence that Creative Education Trust pays above the national STPCD scale, runs its own bespoke pay bands, or adds a flat allowance on top of national pay. That is a genuine finding, not an absence we are glossing over — we looked for exactly the kind of above-scale claim that trusts such as United Learning and Harris Federation make openly on their own recruitment pages, and Creative Education Trust's careers content contains nothing of the kind.

What it contains instead is a fairly standard benefits and development pitch — described in full further down this page — built around the assumption that the underlying salary is the national scale a teacher would recognise from any maintained school. That is a materially different pitch from a trust competing on headline pay, and it is worth naming plainly rather than treating the absence of an uplift as simply nothing to report.

What live vacancies actually show

Published policy documents describe intentions; live vacancy adverts have to state a real basis of pay for a real post starting soon, which makes them the most reliable public check available. We reviewed current Creative Education Trust postings on the Department for Education's Teaching Vacancies service in September 2026, and the pattern was consistent across every classroom teaching role we found: Teacher of Art and Design Technology at Wrenn School, Teacher of English at Wrenn School, Teacher of Drama at Thistley Hough Academy, Teacher of Science, Lead Practitioner Science and Assistant Director of Learning (KS4 Lead Science) at Abbeyfield School were all advertised with salary stated simply as "MPS/UPS" — the Main Pay Scale and Upper Pay Scale, with no trust-specific label, no quoted uplift percentage, and no allowance mentioned in the headline salary line.

Support-staff postings on the same service quote real cash figures rather than a scale label, and they are worth including here for context on the wider workforce even though this page is primarily about teacher pay: a Higher Learning Teaching Assistant post at Abbeyfield School was advertised at £29,540–£32,597 full-time equivalent, a Teaching Assistant role at Thistley Hough Academy at £26,846–£29,070 FTE, and an Inclusion Unit Assistant at Wrenn School at £29,524–£32,046 FTE. None of these figures suggest a trust paying noticeably above or below what a maintained school in the same area would offer for equivalent support roles.

We treat the consistency of the "MPS/UPS" labelling across multiple schools, multiple subjects and multiple points in the same recruitment cycle as reasonably strong evidence, precisely because a trust running its own bespoke bands — as United Learning does with PT and EPT — has every incentive to say so on the advert, since a differential is a recruitment selling point. The absence of any such label here is itself informative.

The Union Recognition Agreement and how pay is set

Creative Education Trust has a published Union Recognition Agreement dated 1 September 2018, which NASUWT's own advice pages for members describe as establishing a Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC) — the forum where NASUWT meets the trust at a national level to negotiate on pay, conditions of service, and on policies and procedures affecting teachers. That is standing collective bargaining machinery rather than a trust simply announcing a number each September, and it puts Creative Education Trust in the same broad category as Oasis Community Learning, which has a comparable — though not identical — recognition-based commitment to national terms.

The clearest evidence of how that machinery has actually operated comes from a NASUWT bulletin dated January 2019, which recorded that Creative Education Trust "agreed to follow the STPCD pay recommendation on all pay scales" for the 2018–19 pay round. Read alongside the current vacancy evidence above, that is a consistent picture spanning roughly eight years: a trust that negotiates through recognised unions and, at least on the one occasion we found documented in detail, adopted the School Teachers' Review Body's recommended award in full rather than negotiating a different local figure.

We also found no published, standalone Creative Education Trust teachers' pay policy of the kind that would normally set out threshold arrangements, TLR ranges, the annual review timetable and an appeals route. That is a genuine gap rather than something we are choosing not to report, and it means the recognition agreement and the live adverts are doing the work that a detailed pay policy would normally do elsewhere. Ask for the current pay policy directly if you are offered a post — a trust with active negotiating machinery should have no difficulty producing one.

The gender pay gap the trust reports itself

This is the most substantial thing on this page that has nothing to do with the headline pay scale, and it comes from the trust's own statutory disclosures rather than from a third party. Under the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017, Creative Education Trust reports its gender pay gap annually to the government's gender pay gap service.

The report covering the snapshot date of 31 March 2024 recorded 1,811 relevant employees in receipt of full pay, of whom 1,327 — 73 per cent — were female. The median gender pay gap was 33.45 per cent and the mean gap was 15.02 per cent. The following year's report, covering the snapshot date of 31 March 2025, showed a broadly similar median position — described on the government's own service as women earning 67p for every £1 men earned — alongside pay-quartile data showing women made up 64.7 per cent of the highest-paid quarter of staff and 80.6 per cent of the lowest-paid quarter.

Read those figures together rather than in isolation and a specific, unglamorous explanation emerges. Because women make up roughly three-quarters of the entire workforce, they are a numerical majority in every pay quartile, including the highest-paid one — so this is not simply a story of women being shut out of senior roles. The gap instead reflects how full-time, higher-banded posts and part-time, lower-banded posts are distributed across an overwhelmingly female workforce that spans classroom teaching, teaching assistant, pastoral and catering roles at very different pay levels. That pattern — a large, majority-female support-staff workforce pulling the median gap up even where women also hold many of the best-paid jobs — recurs across the school sector generally and is not unique to this trust. It is, however, a real and disclosed figure, and a wide gap is a wide gap regardless of the underlying mechanism.

Ofsted, finances and a change of chief executive

Three further facts are worth knowing before applying, none of them about the pay scale directly.

On Ofsted, one third-party school-data aggregator's compilation of the trust's inspection outcomes — current through roughly mid-2024 rather than fully up to date — recorded 13 of the trust's academies rated Good, 3 rated Requires Improvement, 1 rated Inadequate, and none rated Outstanding, which works out to 76 per cent rated Good or better. We have not been able to independently verify each individual school's current Ofsted grade against that compilation, inspection outcomes at individual schools will have moved since that data was captured, and the figure should be treated as a snapshot rather than a live status. Check any specific school's current rating directly on Ofsted's own Report a concern about a school search before relying on it.

On finances, the trust's accounts for the year ended 31 August 2025 recorded an in-year balance of £803,000 and a revenue reserve of £10,177,000 across the 17 academies. Neither figure suggests a trust in financial distress, though we were not able to establish the trust's total income for the year, its total staff headcount, or any senior executive pay band from the sources we could access — several of the trust's own published statutory documents are scanned or image-based PDFs that did not yield extractable text during our research, which is a limitation of the document rather than a sign anything is being withheld.

On leadership, the trust changed chief executive during 2025. Marc Jordan led Creative Education Trust for 15 years before stepping down, and Nicole McCartney was appointed as his successor, taking up the post in September 2025. That is a genuinely significant transition for an organisation of this size, and it means any employee review, public statement or piece of reporting that predates autumn 2025 describes the trust under different leadership from the one currently in post.

Beyond salary: the rest of the package

Creative Education Trust's own careers content sets out a fairly conventional but genuine benefits package, built around professional development and wellbeing rather than headline cash.

• Teachers' Pension Scheme for teaching staff, with the trust describing it as "one of the best pension schemes in the UK" on its own careers page — standard TPS terms, which is what STPCD-aligned employment implies, though confirm this in writing at offer stage as with any employer.
• Local Government Pension Scheme for eligible support staff, described by the trust as "one of the most valuable workplace pensions in the UK" — a genuinely strong defined-benefit arrangement for non-teaching roles.
• TES Develop — access to a range of professional development courses, positioned as part of the trust's wider emphasis on "professional growth and leadership at every level".
• Professional fees paid — reimbursement of one professional membership or subscription fee per year.
• Health Assured Employee Assistance Programme — free, confidential support available 24 hours a day.
• Health Cash Plan covering routine costs such as dental, optical and physiotherapy treatment.
• VivUp discounts, GymFlex gym membership rates, a Bike2Work scheme and a rental deposit loan for staff relocating — a practical, if modest, benefit for anyone moving to take up a post in one of the trust's three regional clusters.

None of this is unusual by the standards of a mid-sized English academy trust, and the trust makes no claim that it is. What it does suggest, taken together with the plain national pay scale, is an employer competing primarily on development opportunities and day-to-day support rather than on headline salary — a legitimate strategy, and one worth weighing against a trust offering more cash and less of everything else.

What it's like to work at Creative Education Trust

Employee review data for this trust is thinner than for the large national chains profiled elsewhere on this site, and what exists should be read with that in mind. Creative Education Trust's Glassdoor profile showed a rating of approximately 3.6 out of 5 from only 14 ratings, with roughly 68 per cent of reviewers saying they would recommend the employer to a friend, and 42 per cent approving of the chief executive at the time the sample was recorded — figures that most likely reflect the trust under Marc Jordan's leadership rather than under Nicole McCartney, given the September 2025 transition described above.

We found no record of industrial action, a formal strike ballot, or a public union campaign specifically targeting Creative Education Trust, in contrast to the documented disputes at trusts such as Harris Federation and United Learning covered elsewhere on this site. We would rather report that absence plainly than either treat it as proof of good industrial relations or ignore it: it may simply mean nothing newsworthy has happened, or it may mean any disputes have stayed local to a single school and out of national reporting. The existence of the JNC and the 2018 recognition agreement is the more solid, documented evidence of the trust's approach to union relations, and it points towards a trust that negotiates rather than one that has faced a high-profile confrontation.

What's verified and what isn't

As on every page in this section, here is the evidential status of the claims above, stated explicitly.

• Well evidenced: 17 academies (11 secondary, 6 primary) across three regional clusters — Great Yarmouth, the East Midlands and the West Midlands — per the trust's own school directory.
• Well evidenced: over 13,500 pupils, per the trust's own about-us page, with minor variation in third-party aggregator figures.
• Well evidenced: current classroom teaching vacancies quoting plain "MPS/UPS" with no uplift, checked directly on the Teaching Vacancies service across multiple schools and subjects in September 2026.
• Well evidenced: the Union Recognition Agreement dated 1 September 2018 and the existence of a Joint Negotiating Committee, per NASUWT's own published advice for members.
• Well evidenced: the January 2019 NASUWT bulletin recording that the trust agreed to follow the STPCD pay recommendation on all pay scales for 2018–19.
• Well evidenced: the trust's own gender pay gap disclosures for the 31 March 2024 and 31 March 2025 snapshots.
• Well evidenced: the change of chief executive from Marc Jordan to Nicole McCartney, effective September 2025, and Marc Jordan's 15-year tenure.
• Well evidenced: the in-year balance of £803,000 and revenue reserve of £10,177,000 for the year ended 31 August 2025.

• Not found: any published, standalone Creative Education Trust teachers' pay policy document setting out current threshold, TLR or appeals arrangements.
• Not verified: whether the trust has followed the STRB's recommended pay award in full in every year since 2018–19, or only in the specific round the NASUWT bulletin describes.
• Not verified: the full text of the 2018 Union Recognition Agreement, or how frequently the Joint Negotiating Committee currently meets — the source document was not accessible to us.
• Not found: the trust's total income, total staff headcount, or any senior executive pay band — several of the trust's own statutory documents were image-based PDFs that did not yield extractable text.
• Not verified: the exact current pupil count, given a discrepancy of a few hundred to roughly a thousand pupils between the trust's own figure and third-party aggregators.
• Not verified: current Ofsted ratings at each individual academy — the 76 per cent good-or-better figure comes from a third-party compilation current to roughly mid-2024 rather than a live source.
• Not found: any record of industrial action, a strike ballot, or a public union dispute specific to Creative Education Trust.
• Not verified: whether the Glassdoor rating and recommendation figures, drawn from only 14 reviews largely predating the September 2025 leadership change, reflect the trust as it is currently run.

Creative Education Trust and the academy pay floor

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 requires academies to have regard to the STPCD and to meet a statutory minimum pay floor set by reference to it, extending the School Teachers' Review Body's remit to cover academies for the first time. The timing 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 only become 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. The September 2027 date sometimes quoted alongside this Act concerns a separate provision, QTS becoming a requirement in academies, not the pay floor itself.

For most trusts profiled on this site, the interesting question is how far above or below the coming floor their existing pay sits. For Creative Education Trust, on the evidence gathered here, that question barely arises: a trust that already pays the plain national scale and has, at least once, formally agreed to follow the STRB's recommendation in full is not going to find a floor set by reference to that same recommendation a stretch to meet. If anything, this Act moves the wider sector some distance towards the position Creative Education Trust already appears to occupy, rather than requiring the trust itself to change course.

Read our full explainer on the academy pay floor for the detail of what the Act does and does not require, and how the conditions side — directed time and the rest of the STPCD beyond pay — is being phased in separately.

How to check before you apply

Everything above is assembled from public sources gathered in September 2026, at a trust that changed chief executive within the past year. Verify the position yourself before accepting any post, and verify it for the specific school rather than the trust as a whole.

None of these are difficult or unusual questions, and a trust with active negotiating machinery and a recently appointed chief executive should be well placed to answer all of them.