Dixons Academies Trust Teacher Pay Explained

Most of the trust profiles on this site are organised around a pay number. This one cannot be, and that is the honest starting point rather than an apology for it. Dixons Academies Trust is one of the more talked-about multi-academy trusts in England right now, but almost none of that attention is about salary. It is about hours. Dixons is the trust that gave its teachers a day off every fortnight and kept paying them the same, and then let researchers in to find out what happened. That is a genuinely unusual thing for an employer to do, and it produced a genuinely unusual amount of evidence — including evidence that is not flattering.

So this page inverts the usual structure. The pay section is short, because there is little to say with confidence. The conditions section is long, because there is a great deal to say and it is properly sourced. If you are weighing up a Dixons post, the hours are almost certainly the thing that will actually change your life, not the salary line.

What Dixons Academies Trust actually is

Dixons Academies Trust is a Bradford-based multi-academy trust, registered at Ripley Street in Bradford and incorporated in 1988, making it one of the older education charities to have become a MAT. It has grown outwards from West Yorkshire into Greater Manchester and Merseyside, and the Department for Education's Get Information About Schools register currently lists around 21 open schools in the group — a mix of secondaries, primaries and a sixth form, in Bradford, Leeds, Bingley, Liverpool, Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne and Stalybridge.

You will see different school counts quoted, and they are not errors so much as snapshots. The Tes investigation in June 2024 described Dixons as having 17 schools; the DfE's financial benchmarking data for the year to August 2025 also uses 17; the trust's own material has spoken of 16 and then 17 as it expanded. The register's current figure is higher because the trust has kept growing. The research brief for this page suggested 16 schools — that is out of date, and the nine-day fortnight was introduced across the trust rather than in a fixed subset of that size.

The trust is led by Luke Sparkes, who took over in 2022 and who, in September 2024, dropped the "chief executive" title in favour of "School and College Trust Leader" as a deliberate flattening of hierarchy. That is a small detail, but it is characteristic: Dixons is a trust that makes structural gestures and then talks about them publicly. Financially it looks reasonably stable — DfE benchmarking shows an in-year balance of around £2.4 million and revenue reserves of roughly £8.7 million for September 2024 to August 2025, after an operating deficit of about £800,000 in the previous year that the trust attributed partly to around half a million pounds spent restructuring its business services.

The pay question we could not answer

The best available map of which English academy trusts pay above the national scale is the Tes "MAT Tracker" investigation published on 7 June 2024, which approached every trust in the country and received 625 replies. It identified 12 trusts running 271 academies paying above the national pay scales, with uplifts ranging from 0.1 per cent to 5.6 per cent, and named the notable ones: United Learning at 5.6 per cent, Ark Schools at around 2.5 per cent, Harris Federation at 2 to 3 per cent plus allowances, Durrington and Advantage Schools at around 1 per cent.

Dixons appears in that investigation — but only as a trust that did not respond to the freedom of information request. Tes mentions it in the context of its nine-day fortnight announcement, not in the pay tables. That matters more than it might seem. A non-response is not evidence of paying below scale, and it is not evidence of paying above it either. It is simply an absence, and a trust that declines to answer a pay survey while publicising a flexible working policy has made a choice about what it wants to be known for.

What the published pay policy actually shows

Dixons does publish a pay policy, which puts it ahead of several trusts we have profiled. The problem is its date: the version available on the trust's website carries a "Date of Last Review: September 2020", despite the policy itself stating that it is reviewed annually by the Trust Board. Six years is a long time in teacher pay — national scales have risen substantially since — so the cash figures in it are of no use at all as a guide to what you would earn now.

What the figures are useful for is structural comparison, and here the answer is clear. The policy's main pay range runs from £25,714 to £36,961 across six reference points; its upper pay range runs £38,690, £40,124, £41,604; its unqualified range runs £18,169 to £28,735. Every one of those numbers is an exact match for the 2020/21 STPCD national (rest of England) figures. Its TLR values — TLR1 £8,470 to £13,311, TLR2 £2,873 to £6,655, TLR3 £1,089 to £2,178 — likewise track the statutory ranges of that year.

In other words: as of its last published review, Dixons mirrored the national scale point for point, with no uplift and no bespoke structure. It also states that academies are assigned to pay groups "using STPCD as a guidance" and that pay protection follows STPCD provisions. That is the behaviour of a trust that has chosen to adopt the national framework rather than depart from it — which, as our overview of academy trust pay explains, is what the overwhelming majority of trusts do.

The third column is there to show how far the policy has drifted from reality, not to suggest Dixons pays those 2026/27 figures. Our current national pay scales guide has the live structure, and the take-home pay calculator will turn any of it into a monthly number.

Current Dixons vacancies support the same reading without confirming it. Adverts we checked on Teaching Vacancies and Tes Jobs quote "MPS/UPS" — a Teacher of Chemistry post at Dixons Sixth Form advertised in May 2026 gave "MPS/UPS" with no figure attached, and a Teacher of Science post at Dixons McMillan Academy quoted a range spanning main to upper scale. Crucially, none of them advertise a trust uplift. Trusts that pay above scale almost always say so in adverts, because it is a recruitment advantage they have paid for. Dixons advertises its nine-day fortnight instead.

Progression at Dixons is not automatic — and that is worth knowing

There is one genuinely distinctive feature of the Dixons pay policy that has nothing to do with the headline rate, and it is the part we would want a candidate to read. Progression up the main pay range at Dixons is explicitly performance-linked, and the policy goes further than most in spelling out how.

• Teachers are considered automatically, but progression is not automatic. No application is needed, but movement up a point depends on appraisal outcomes, "consistently good teaching evidenced throughout the year", student progress targets and full achievement of the Teachers' Standards and career stage expectations.
• There are two "mini-thresholds" inside the main range, at M2–M3 and M4–M5, where formal consideration takes place. The policy states plainly that a teacher may not progress at these points even if they are not on a capability plan.
• Movement down the upper pay range is contemplated. Where a teacher on UPS is judged to be meeting only M6 career stage expectations, the policy says they "will be approached to consider movement down the pay scale" to avoid capability proceedings against post-threshold criteria. Pay is not moved down within M1–M6.
• Upper pay range progression is every two years, on application by the teacher, assessed by the Principal and decided by the governing body — and applications must contain evidence from the previous two years.
• Senior leaders have a performance-related element of between 1 and 8 per cent of salary, rising to 10 per cent in an exceptional year where budgets allow a bonus for all staff, with Principals able to opt out of the PRP element and negotiate salary instead.

Compare that with trusts like E-ACT and The Elliot Foundation, whose published policies state that annual progression is automatic and not linked to performance. Two trusts can both "pay the national scale" and still deliver materially different lifetime earnings, because the rate at which you move up it is not the same. That is the kind of difference the headline percentage never captures. Our guide to crossing the UPS threshold covers the general process; the Dixons variant is stricter than the national default in both directions.

The nine-day fortnight: the real story

In January 2024 Dixons announced that it would give teaching staff a nine-day working fortnight. From September 2024 the arrangement became permanent across the trust's schools: teaching staff work nine of every ten school days, keep their full salary, and pupils lose no teaching time. As far as we can establish, no other multi-academy trust in England has done this at scale.

The stated rationale is recruitment and retention. Dixons frames it within a broader commitment to giving teachers "more agency over their roles by finding ways to give them more time back", and offers it alongside other flexible arrangements: remote PPA that can be done away from school, compressed non-contact hours so staff can be off site for longer blocks, and term-time personal days. Where a full nine-day pattern is not workable in a particular school, the remote and compressed options are offered instead.

Those three figures are the trust's own and have not been independently audited, so read them as a claim rather than a measurement. The earlier, school-level figures reported by Schools Week in December 2024 are more granular and point the same way: at Dixons Fazakerley Academy, teaching applications went from 38 in October 2023 to 157 in October 2024, spending on cover staff fell from about £44,000 to about £9,000 across the first three months of the year, and positive responses on job satisfaction rose from 42 per cent to 84 per cent. Across the trust, 62 per cent said they rarely or never considered leaving, up from 50 per cent, and 75 per cent said they would recommend the trust as a good place to work, up from 61 per cent.

The trust has also said the policy costs it nothing extra — it is funded by reallocating existing resource, with around £1 million a year in expected savings from a back-office transformation programme by 2026/27 helping to carry it.

How the hours actually work

This is the mechanical heart of the page, and it is where a plausible-sounding policy gets complicated. "A day off every fortnight on full pay" can mean two very different things: genuinely working ten per cent less for the same money, or doing ten days of work in nine. The evidence says Dixons landed somewhere between the two, and did not land in the same place in every school.

The fair summary is this: the nine-day fortnight at Dixons is a real reduction in days for teaching staff, a partial and variable reduction in hours, and an increase in the intensity of the days you do work. For many teachers a whole day genuinely free every fortnight — usable for appointments, childcare, rest or simply not being in a school building — is worth more than the same number of hours sprinkled thinly across ten days. For others, a more punishing working day is a bad trade. Both reactions appear in the evaluation.

What the independent evaluation found

The Education Endowment Foundation commissioned the Ambition Institute and IFF Research to evaluate the policy. The scoping-phase findings, published on 29 October 2025, covered the first year of implementation and drew on interviews with teachers and leaders in seven Dixons schools. It is qualitative, early-stage research on a self-selected trust rather than a controlled trial, so it establishes perceptions rather than causal effects — but it is independent, and it is far more than any other trust's flagship policy has been subjected to.

• Wellbeing and job satisfaction improved. Most teachers said the policy had improved their wellbeing and job satisfaction, and it was generally well received as offering better work-life balance and flexibility.
• Teachers reported more free time and financial savings — a day out of school a fortnight has real cash value in commuting and childcare terms that no payslip records.
• Leaders reported mental health benefits, in some cases describing them as unexpected.
• Pupils were largely unaffected. Staff did not perceive negative impacts on pupils, and some pupils were seen to benefit from exposure to a wider range of teachers.
• Early signs of recruitment interest — leaders reported that potential recruits were drawn to the policy.

• Workload was not cut by ten per cent. Schools used condensed hours or a smaller reduction, and some staff felt overwhelmed by the condensed schedule.
• Many leaders used their day off to work from home rather than to rest — which tells you something about whether the work actually shrank.
• Early career teachers had less access to developmental support from senior leaders. For an ECT, the induction relationship with a mentor and with senior staff is the single most important determinant of how the first two years go, and a fortnightly rota cuts into contact time on both sides.
• Non-teaching staff experienced a negative morale impact, feeling excluded from the policy's benefits. The scheme covers teaching staff; administrative, facilities and support colleagues do not get the day off.
• Timetabling was a consistent challenge, and the evaluation flagged equity concerns for part-time teachers as well as ECTs.

The support staff finding deserves a line too. Teaching assistants, administrators, site staff and cover supervisors keep working ten days in ten while colleagues in the same building work nine. That is a visible, daily inequality, and the evaluation recorded its effect on morale plainly. If you are applying for a non-teaching role at Dixons — see our cover supervisor pay guide for that end of the workforce — the nine-day fortnight is not part of your offer.

The 2026 class-size controversy

Eighteen months in, the policy collided with the trust's finances and with its unions, in a dispute reported by Education Uncovered across two articles in May 2026. It is the most serious challenge the nine-day fortnight has faced, and it turns on exactly the mechanical question set out above: where does the cover come from?

Both sides have a coherent case here, and it is worth setting them out fairly rather than picking one.

We have not found reporting on how those votes went, whether the class-size proposals were implemented, or how the redundancy dispute resolved. If you are applying to Dixons Allerton or Dixons Fazakerley in particular, that is a live situation you should ask about directly rather than assume is settled.

What's verified and what isn't

As with every profile in this section, here is the evidential status of each claim, stated plainly rather than presented with uniform confidence.

• Well evidenced: the nine-day fortnight exists, is permanent from September 2024, applies to teaching staff on full pay, and preserves pupil teaching time. Reported by Schools Week, Tes and Personnel Today, and described by the trust itself.
• Well evidenced: the independent evaluation by the Ambition Institute and IFF Research, commissioned by the EEF, covering seven Dixons schools in year one and published on 29 October 2025 — including both its positive findings and its findings on condensed hours, ECT support and support staff exclusion.
• Well evidenced: that Dixons did not respond to the Tes freedom of information request on teacher pay in 2024.
• Well evidenced: the content of the trust's published pay policy, including its September 2020 review date, its national-scale pay points and its performance-linked progression rules.
• Well evidenced: the May 2026 class-size dispute as reported by Education Uncovered, including both the NEU's characterisation and the trust's denial and response.

• Not verified: whether Dixons pays above, at, or below the national scale today. This is the central gap in this page and we could not close it.
• Not verified: whether the September 2020 pay policy remains in force, or whether pay ranges and progression rules have changed since.
• Not verified: the trust's own 43 per cent turnover, 518 sickness days and 12 per cent applicant figures. These are self-reported and we found no independent audit of them.
• Not verified: any directed time figure for any Dixons school, or how the nine-day fortnight compares to 1,265 hours in practice.
• Not verified: whether a formal trade union recognition agreement exists at Dixons. We found no published agreement, though the NEU is plainly organised and active across the trust.
• Not verified: the outcome of the May 2026 staff votes at Allerton and Fazakerley, or the resolution of the associated redundancy dispute.

How to check the position yourself

Because the pay position here is genuinely unestablished, the questions below matter more at Dixons than they would at a trust whose figure is published. None of them are awkward, and a well-run trust will answer all of them.

• Ask outright whether the trust pays the national scale or above it. Dixons has not answered this publicly, so ask it directly and ask for the answer in writing. Ask specifically about the Main Pay Range, the Upper Pay Range and TLRs separately.
• Ask for the current pay policy and check its review date. The version on the website dates from September 2020. If the current one is newer, you want to see it; if it isn't, that is informative in itself.
• Ask exactly how the nine-day fortnight works at that specific school. Which day is yours? Is it fixed or rotating? Is your whole department off together? How many lessons will you teach across the fortnight against a full allocation?
• Ask whether your contracted hours are reduced, or redistributed. This is the question that determines whether the policy is a pay rise in disguise or a compression in disguise. The evaluation found schools varied, so the trust-level answer will not tell you about your school.
• Ask about class sizes and dynamic grouping — what proportion of lessons involve merged groups, what the maximum group size is, and whether keeping the fortnight is conditional on accepting larger groups. This is a live 2026 issue at two named academies.
• If you are an ECT, ask how induction works around the rota. When do mentor meetings happen? What if your day off clashes with your mentor's? How is your ECF entitlement protected?
• Ask how progression decisions are made, given the policy's mini-thresholds at M2–M3 and M4–M5 where progression can be withheld without capability proceedings.
• Confirm the pension is the Teachers' Pension Scheme on standard terms. A trust setting its own conditions should always be asked this. Our pension guide explains why any alternative is almost always a worse deal over a career.
• Talk to staff at that school, including a union rep if there is one. Given the 2026 disputes, this is more valuable at Dixons than at most trusts.

One closing thought on how to weigh all this. The instinct when reading about a trust with a live union dispute is to treat it as a red flag, and the instinct when reading about a trust with a flagship wellbeing policy is to treat it as a green one. Dixons has both, and they are causally connected — the dispute exists because the policy is expensive to sustain. What that should tell you is not that the trust is good or bad, but that it is genuinely trying something, and that you should find out in detail how the experiment is going in the specific building you would work in.