Durrington Multi Academy Trust Teacher Pay Explained

Durrington Multi Academy Trust is a small West Sussex trust that has punched above its weight in national education conversation, largely because of its work on evidence-informed teaching and workload reduction. It has also appeared, at the bottom of the range, on the short list of English trusts identified as paying above the national teacher pay scale. This page takes those two things in the order that reflects their actual reliability — which means dealing with the pay claim first and briefly, because it is the weaker of the two, and then spending most of the page on the part that is properly documented.

The pay claim, and why we can't confirm it

Here is the problem stated plainly, at the top, rather than buried at the bottom.

There is a second timing problem worth knowing about. The Tes advert most often cited as evidence of the trust's enhanced pay — the one containing the phrases "Enhanced pay scales and rapid progression opportunities" and "Teacher non-contact time above the national average" alongside a "DMAT M1 – UPR3" salary line — closed on 7 February 2019. It is a seven-year-old advert. Citing it as current evidence of a trust's pay position, as several secondary sources effectively do, is not sound, and we are not going to repeat the mistake.

The arithmetic on the old adverts

What the older adverts do establish, and establish quite well, is that the differential was real and that it was precisely 1 per cent rather than a vague "enhanced" gesture. The figures check out against the national scale of their year to within a few pounds.

Five figures drawn from two different pay years, each landing within a rounding error of exactly 1 per cent above the corresponding national point, is not a coincidence. The trust was applying a flat 1 per cent uplift to every point on the national scale and rebadging the result as the DMAT scale. That is a cleaner and more transparent arrangement than it might sound — it means the structure, the point spacing and the progression framework were all still the national ones, with a small multiplier on top.

One of those adverts, for a Deputy Leader of Mathematics, also quoted a leadership allowance of £2,000 to £3,000 a year depending on experience, on top of the DMAT M1–UPR3 range. That is effectively a TLR-shaped payment, and at £2,000 to £3,000 it was worth two to three times more than the 1 per cent uplift on a typical main range salary — which is the recurring lesson of trust pay comparisons generally.

Run that through our take-home pay calculator and the monthly difference lands somewhere around £15 to £22 for a main range teacher. It is not nothing. It is also not a reason to choose an employer, and it would be a strange thing to weigh heavily against, say, a forty-minute difference in commute.

What the current advert says

The most recent Durrington High School advert we could find is instructive precisely because of what it keeps and what it drops. The pay branding is gone — it is the national scale, on a national label, at national figures. But every one of the workload and wellbeing commitments survives, in specific terms:

• "Teacher non-contact time above the national average."
• "All staff are registered with Healthshield for a range of wellbeing and practical support services."
• "We have just three data collection points for each year group in a year."
• "We do not grade lesson observations."
• Streamlined feedback and homework policies developed at department level to reduce workload.
• No lengthy written reports — teachers record grades and effort judgements rather than narrative comments.
• Fortnightly joint planning sessions and INSET time given over to collaborative curriculum work, explicitly to save individual preparation time.
• No expectation of extensive appraisal evidence files.

A trust that had quietly stopped doing the expensive things would not keep advertising them in the same document where it dropped the pay claim. The straightforward reading is that the workload offer is the thing DMAT currently believes is its recruitment advantage — and on the evidence, it is right about that.

What the trust actually is

Durrington Multi Academy Trust is based in Worthing, West Sussex. It comprises four schools — Durrington High School, The Laurels Primary School, Oak Tree Primary School and Ringmer Primary & Nursery School — together with Durrington Research School and the South Downs teacher training hub.

Older sources describe DMAT as a two-school trust. That is out of date and worth correcting, because it affects how you read anything else written about it. The trust advertised for a new Chief Executive Officer and Accounting Officer during 2026, with applications closing on 28 September 2026 — a leadership transition that is relevant context if you are assessing whether current policies are likely to persist, since a small trust's culture depends heavily on who is running it.

The scale has a second consequence that cuts in the applicant's favour. With one secondary school, the trust and the school are close to the same thing. When a 39-school network like Ark describes its culture, you are reading an average across wildly different places. When a four-school trust describes its data collection policy, it is describing a policy you could verify on a visit.

The real strength: workload policy

This is the substance of the page, and the reason we wrote it despite the pay claim being unconfirmed. Almost every school in England says it cares about workload. Very few say anything specific enough to be held to. DMAT does, and the specificity is what makes it evidence rather than marketing.

Three data collection points per year group per year. This is the standout figure. Data drops are one of the largest recurring workload costs in secondary teaching — each one generates an assessment, a marking round, an entry deadline, and usually a follow-up conversation about the resulting spreadsheet. Six drops a year is common; more is not unusual. Three is genuinely low, and the trust adds that all data analysis is carried out centrally for teachers rather than devolved to departments.

Ungraded lesson observations. The trust's material states plainly that it does not grade lessons and instead "talks about great teaching". This matters more than it sounds. Ofsted itself stopped grading individual lessons years ago, precisely because single-lesson grades are unreliable, but a great many schools continued the practice internally. Attaching a number to a lesson changes what an observation is for: it turns a developmental conversation into a judgement with career consequences, which in turn drives the performance lesson, the elaborate resourcing, and the defensive preparation that consume evenings.

Department-level feedback and homework policies. The trust states there is no trust-wide approach to marking and feedback and no centrally prescribed frequency of written feedback. Each department develops its own streamlined policy. This is the "tight but loose" model in practice — consistent core expectations, autonomy over delivery — and it is the specific opposite of the centrally-mandated triple-marking regimes that drove much of the workload crisis in the 2010s.

Reporting to parents without narrative comments. Teachers record grades and effort judgements rather than writing individual written comments for every student. Report writing season is one of the sharpest workload spikes in the school year, and removing the free-text requirement removes most of it.

No extensive appraisal evidence files. Assembling an evidence portfolio is pure administrative overhead that produces nothing for students. Stating that staff are not expected to keep one is a small commitment that saves real hours.

No evening or weekend email expectation. The vacancies page states: "There is no expectation that staff respond to emails in the evening or at weekends." This is the easiest commitment to make and the hardest to keep, and it is the one most worth testing by asking current staff rather than leadership.

Non-contact time and class sizes

Two further claims appear consistently across the trust's recruitment material, including the current advert: that teacher non-contact time is above the national average, and that class sizes are below national averages.

Non-contact time is the more valuable of the two, and it is worth being clear about why. The STPCD guarantees qualified teachers a minimum of 10 per cent of timetabled teaching time as planning, preparation and assessment time. Anything above that minimum is directly convertible into work you would otherwise do at home. A timetable with, say, 12 per cent rather than 10 per cent of non-contact time is worth roughly an extra lesson a week — and across a year that is a larger real benefit than 1 per cent of salary by a wide margin, because it is time rather than money and time is the resource teachers are actually short of.

On wellbeing provision, the trust states that all staff are registered with Healthshield — a health cash plan covering, among other things, musculoskeletal treatments, 24/7 GP access and an Employee Assistance Programme. Health cash plans are a modest but real benefit with an actual cash value, typically worth somewhere in the low hundreds of pounds a year if you use them, and they are more common in the private sector than in schools.

Research School and teacher training

Durrington Research School is a DfE-designated Research School, part of the network associated with the Education Endowment Foundation, whose role is to connect schools in its region with evidence about effective teaching and to run training on it. The trust also hosts the South Downs teacher training hub, providing an initial teacher training route into the profession.

For someone weighing up a post, these are not decorative. A Research School designation means professional development is a core function of the organisation rather than something bolted on at the end of a Wednesday, and it is also the intellectual foundation for everything in the workload section above. The case for ungraded observations, for fewer data drops, and for stripping out narrative report comments is an evidence-based case — these practices were dropped because the evidence says they cost a lot and deliver little. A trust that houses a Research School is more likely than most to have reached those conclusions deliberately rather than as a cost-saving exercise.

The trust's recruitment material also describes Early Career Framework support and collaborative curriculum work across schools. If you are still choosing a route into teaching, our comparison of training routes covers how a school-based SCITT differs from a university PGCE.

Is low workload worth more than 1%?

We would not normally set these two things against each other so directly, but in this case the comparison is the point. A trust with a tiny pay differential and a serious workload policy is a much more interesting proposition than the headline "1 per cent above scale" suggests, and a reader who came here looking for the pay figure would leave with the wrong impression of what this employer is actually offering. Workload and its effect on retention is the dominant issue in teacher recruitment — our guide on whether to leave teaching covers what actually drives people out, and it is very rarely a percentage point of salary.

What's verified and what isn't

• Well evidenced: that older Durrington High School adverts quoted a trust-branded "DMAT M1 – UPR3" scale, and that the figures quoted work out to almost exactly 1% above the national points of the corresponding pay year — verified across five figures from two different pay years.
• Well evidenced: the workload and wellbeing commitments, because they appear in current recruitment material in specific, checkable terms — three data collection points, ungraded observations, department-set feedback policies, no lengthy reports, no appraisal evidence files, fortnightly joint planning, Healthshield registration for all staff.
• Well evidenced: that the trust's own vacancies page states there is no expectation of evening or weekend email replies, and that class sizes are below national averages.
• Well evidenced: the trust composition — four schools plus Durrington Research School and the South Downs teacher training hub — and the CEO vacancy closing 28 September 2026.
• Well evidenced: that the trust publishes annual financial statements, including for 2024/25.

• Not verified — the central caveat: whether the ~1% above-scale differential still applies in the 2025/26 or 2026/27 recruitment round. The most recent advert we found says "National Teacher Pay Scale" at exactly the national figures.
• Not found: any published DMAT pay policy document with actual scale points. Unlike E-ACT, the trust does not appear to publish one.
• Not found: any percentage above-scale figure stated on the trust's own website. The 1% is derived from advert arithmetic and third-party reporting, not from a trust statement.
• Not found: any stated position on directed time or the 1,265-hour annual limit.
• Not found: any union commentary, dispute or independent press coverage of this trust beyond the original Tes investigation into above-scale trusts — which cuts both ways, since it also means no reported disputes.
• Not found: meaningful volume of employee review data. There is too little to draw anything from, and we are not going to characterise an employer from a handful of reviews.
• Not verified: the actual non-contact time percentage or class size figures behind the "above/below national average" claims.

How to check the current position

More than usually, this page needs checking against reality before you act on it — because its headline claim is one we have flagged as possibly out of date.

• Read the exact salary wording on the advert you are applying to. "DMAT M1 – UPR3" and "National Teacher Pay Scale | M1 - UPR3" are different claims. The label is the tell, and it costs nothing to notice.
• Compare the advertised figures against the current national scale. Divide the advertised M1 by the national M1 for the relevant year. If the answer is 1.01, the uplift is live; if it is 1.00, it is not. Our pay scales guide has the national points.
• Ask directly whether the trust applies an uplift to the national scale. One sentence, easily answered, and it settles the whole question this page could not.
• Ask for the non-contact time allocation as a number. How many periods out of the timetable cycle, and what percentage of timetabled time? Compare with the 10% statutory minimum.
• Ask whether the trust applies the STPCD. Nothing public confirms this either way, and it determines whether the 1,265-hour directed time limit applies to you.
• Test the workload claims with staff, not leadership. Ask a teacher in the department: how many data drops, are observations graded, what does your department's feedback policy actually require, when did you last work a Sunday? These are specific enough that the answers will be consistent if the policies are real.
• Ask about the CEO transition. With a new chief executive appointed during 2026, it is reasonable to ask whether the workload commitments are trust policy or the outgoing leadership's personal approach.
• Ask for a written pay policy at offer stage. We could not find one published. If one exists, the review date on the front tells you how current it is.

The underlying point is one that applies to every trust profile on this site, and applies here with particular force: a page assembled from public sources describes the position as it was recorded, not as it is. For DMAT specifically, the pay half of that record has visibly moved while the workload half has not. Check both.