The Elliot Foundation Academies Trust Teacher Pay Explained

Across this whole research project, the recurring problem has been that academy trusts do not publish enough for anyone outside them to answer the question "what do they pay?". The Elliot Foundation is the exception. It publishes a current pay policy, adopted by its board in March 2026 and covering the 2025/26 year. It publishes a trade union agreement. It publishes its executive pay disclosure. And — remarkably — it has published a Department for Education resource management review of itself, complete with school-by-school turnover figures and a teacher contact ratio, neither of which any trust is under any obligation to make public.

That transparency is the reason this page is the longest and most specific trust profile on the site. It is also the reason it contains two findings that are uncomfortable for the trust — a contradiction between two of its own published documents, and a turnover range that shows enormous variation between its schools. Publishing more means more can be found. We think the honest way to reward that is to report all of it accurately, not to be selectively kind about the trust that gave us the most to work with.

What The Elliot Foundation actually is

The Elliot Foundation Academies Trust — TEFAT — is a primary-only multi-academy trust operating across London, the East of England and the West Midlands. Primary-only is an unusual structure at this scale and, as the section on finances below explains, the chief executive has said publicly that he would not build it that way again.

On size, sources give either 36 or 37 schools depending on date, which is the usual moving-target problem. The trust educates 14,249 pupils plus a further 752 of nursery age, and employs 1,405 full-time equivalent staff across a total headcount of 2,098. The workforce is 91.28 per cent female, which is high even by primary sector standards and is directly relevant to the gender pay gap figures discussed later.

Being primary-only shapes almost everything else on this page. Primary schools are smaller, so trust-level income per school is lower and central costs are spread more thinly. Primary teaching carries a higher natural contact ratio because a class teacher is with their class most of the day. And primary workforces are overwhelmingly female, which interacts with pay gap reporting in ways worth understanding rather than reacting to.

The headline: pay progression is automatic

Since 2014, the STPCD has required that teacher pay progression in maintained schools be linked to performance, and most school and trust pay policies implement that through the appraisal cycle: meet your objectives, get your increment. Academies are not bound by the STPCD, and TEFAT has used that freedom in the direction teachers actually want. Its Pay Policy (All Staff) 2025/26, adopted by the trust board in March 2026, states at section 2.5:

"Annual pay progression within salary range/scale/grade will be automatic and is not linked to performance."

The sentence continues that all employees are nonetheless expected to deliver in line with their job roles and against national standards including the Teachers' Standards as a minimum. So the expectation of professional competence remains; what has been removed is the link between that judgement and the annual increment.

Section 3.4 closes the other common route to withholding progression:

"Funding constraints will not be used as justification for denying pay progression and will not be a factor to consider when applying pay awards."

That is an unusually direct commitment. Affordability is the reason most often cited when a school defers or declines increments, and this policy expressly rules it out as a consideration. Given that the trust has simultaneously disclosed an in-year deficit, that clause is doing real work rather than describing an easy choice.

There is a qualification that an honest reading has to include. The general principle at 2.5 is implemented by the operative clauses at 5.8, 5.12 and 5.14, and those say a point will be awarded for each year of employment to the maximum of the relevant spine unless three conditions are all satisfied: performance has not been satisfactory; and the individual has been subject to a performance support plan or capability process, or concerns have been put in writing about their performance during the academic year; and those concerns have not been satisfactorily addressed by the conclusion of that process.

So progression is not literally unconditional. But the only route to withholding it runs through a formal, documented capability or support process that has already concluded unsatisfactorily — which is a far higher and far more challengeable bar than "your appraisal objectives were not met". In practice, if you are not in a capability process, you progress. That is the difference that matters.

• Main and unqualified spines: one point per year of employment to the maximum, subject only to the three-part capability test (section 5.12).
• Upper pay spine: one point every two years, on the same three-part test applied over the previous and/or current academic year (section 5.14). Biennial UPS progression is standard practice rather than a TEFAT restriction.
• Early career teachers: progression applies automatically from the first day of the term following successful completion of each induction year, handled through the statutory induction process rather than appraisal (sections 5.17 and 5.18).
• Accelerated progression exists too. The trust may award two points in a single year in exceptional circumstances where performance has been excellent, and for UPS may bring a biennial step forward to one year. The process for this is set out in Appendix C, which — unlike Appendix D — is published.
• Maternity leave and long-term sickness are protected. Section 5.26 requires that where an employee is absent long term through disability-related illness or maternity leave, either during the preceding year or at the time of the salary review, pay progression is implemented "as though they had not been absent".

That last protection is worth dwelling on. Losing an increment because you were on maternity leave during the appraisal window is a well-documented way that pay gaps open up over a career, and this policy closes it explicitly rather than relying on general discrimination law to do the work. If you are planning around parental leave, read this alongside our guide to teacher maternity pay and pension, which covers the underlying statutory and Burgundy Book entitlements.

The caveat: Appendix D is missing

Having said all that, there is a hole in the middle of the document, and we are not going to paper over it. Section 4.14 of the pay policy states that all teachers other than those on executive, leadership and leading practitioner ranges "will be paid on the relevant TEFAT pay range as set out in Appendix D".

Appendix D is not in the published PDF. The contents page lists Appendix A (salary determination appeals), Appendix B (access to the upper pay spine) and Appendix C (salary recognition for exceptional performance), and the document ends after Appendix C. There is no Appendix D anywhere in the file.

The one piece of external evidence available points to the national scale. A live vacancy for a classroom teacher (maternity cover) at Parkfield Primary School in Barnet, advertised on the Department for Education's Teaching Vacancies service, quoted "MPS/UPS (Outer London), £39,196 - £58,120". That is the standard Outer London main and upper pay range, quoted without any trust uplift or supplementary allowance attached. If TEFAT were paying above scale, an advert is where you would expect it to say so, because above-scale trusts treat it as a recruitment selling point.

That is suggestive but not conclusive — it is one advert at one school for one post. Ask for Appendix D directly at application or offer stage. It plainly exists as a document; it simply has not been published alongside the policy that references it, which is more likely an oversight in assembling the PDF than a deliberate withholding.

A few other pay mechanics from the policy are worth knowing, because they confirm that TEFAT's departures from national practice are targeted rather than wholesale:

• TLRs follow STPCD. TLR1, TLR2 and TLR3 are awarded on the STPCD basis, with each academy's structure determined locally within the STPCD minimum and maximum limits. One genuine deviation: section 8.7 states that TLR payments are based on the proportion of responsibility the teacher actually carries out, rather than an automatic pro rata reduction for part-time staff — which can work in a part-time teacher's favour.
• SEN allowances follow STPCD criteria and ranges, awarded as spot salaries based on mandatory qualifications, other relevant expertise and the demands of the post.
• Threshold to the upper pay spine follows the standard "highly competent" and "substantial and sustained" tests, with an application deadline of 30 September, a determination communicated before 31 October, and a right of appeal.
• Part-time salaries and directed time are calculated in accordance with the STPCD and the pro rata principle, using the school's timetabled teaching week for a comparable full-time post. Part-time teachers are entitled to be told on request how both their salary and their directed time were calculated.
• Real Living Wage as a floor. The trust commits to enhancing pay scale points where necessary to ensure the hourly rate meets the applicable Real Living Wage, and apprentices are paid the Real Living Wage as a minimum.
• A full pay appeals route with six specified grounds, a 10-working-day window to appeal after written reasons, a hearing normally within 20 working days, and a right to be accompanied by a trade union representative.

Leadership pay, and an unresolved contradiction

The one place where TEFAT does pay above national values is leadership, and this is where two of the trust's own published documents say different things.

The Pay Policy at section 4.5 sets out the arrangement for Executive Principals and Principals. The trust calculates the academy's group size under the STPCD, assigns the appropriate headteacher group, and then selects a range of seven consecutive salary points within it — the individual school range. Then comes the uplift: "the monetary value of these points will reflect a TEFAT 5% uplift to the national values", and once the top of the range is reached the uppermost point "may be increased annually by further additional 5% enhancements, up to a maximum of 15%".

The trust's separate Executive and Senior Leadership Pay disclosure for 2024/25 describes the same headroom as being up to a maximum of 25 per cent.

There is a plausible technical reconciliation, and it is worth setting out so you can ask the right question. The pay policy uses 25 per cent elsewhere, in a different context: sections 8.12 and 8.13 cap additional payments above the maximum of the salary range at 25 per cent of that maximum, for the chief executive and trust officers and for Executive Principals and Principals respectively, and section 8.17 applies a similar 25 per cent cap to temporary payments for additional responsibilities. So the 15 per cent may govern annual enhancement of the substantive range, while the 25 per cent governs discretionary additional payments on top of it. That would make both figures correct about different things.

We are offering that as a possible explanation, not asserting it, because the documents do not say so. What is not in doubt is the base position: TEFAT principals are paid on a range whose monetary values sit 5 per cent above the national leadership values. That is a genuine above-scale element, and it applies to leadership only — there is no published evidence of any equivalent uplift for classroom teachers.

Directed time and the workload protections

We looked for an explicit statement of the 1,265-hour annual directed time limit and did not find one. That is not the same as the limit not applying: the pay policy handles directed time by reference back to standard STPCD terms, requiring part-time directed time to be calculated in accordance with the STPCD and the pro rata principle, and using the standard STPCD daily rate of one 195th of full-time equivalent salary for both additional hours worked by agreement and deductions for unpaid absence. A trust calculating pay on a 195-day year and pro-rating directed time under the STPCD is working inside the national framework, not outside it.

Two specific protections are worth calling out because they are unusually concrete.

• Lesson observations are capped at the STPCD limit — three per year, three hours in total. Some schools treat that ceiling as advisory; setting it out in policy makes it enforceable.
• Appraisal happens in directed time, and not in PPA. The trust's Appraisal Policy states that appraisal "will take place within the teacher's directed time, but not within a teacher's PPA (planning, preparation and assessment) time". That is a genuinely useful, specific protection: PPA is the one part of the timetable legally ring-fenced for planning, and using it for appraisal meetings is a common way schools quietly erode it.

Against those, a real gap. The Appraisal Policy cross-references a Health and Wellbeing Policy, but we could not find that document published anywhere. A policy that is referenced but not accessible is worse than one that does not exist, because it creates the appearance of a protection nobody outside the trust can check the content of. Ask for it. We also found no published workload charter of the kind a number of trusts now issue.

The 68.2% contact ratio

This is the single most useful number on this page, and it exists only because the trust chose to publish a report about itself that it did not have to.

TEFAT self-published a Department for Education School Resource Management Adviser report — an SRMA review, the process the DfE uses to examine the finances and efficiency of trusts under financial pressure. Buried in it is a disclosure of the trust's teacher contact ratio: 68.2 per cent, against what the report itself describes as "the DfE and Union guidance of 76-78%".

Contact ratio is the proportion of a teacher's working time spent teaching a class, as against planning, preparation, assessment, leadership and other non-contact activity. A ratio below the guidance range means teachers in this trust spend less of their time in direct teaching contact than the sector benchmark assumes — which, from a teacher's point of view, means more non-contact time. In a primary trust, where the structural tendency is for a class teacher to be with their class nearly all day, that is a notable position to be in.

Two honest caveats. First, a contact ratio is a trust-wide average and will vary by school and by role; yours will not necessarily be 68.2 per cent. Second, and more importantly, a low contact ratio is expensive — it means paying for more teaching capacity per taught hour — and the SRMA report exists precisely because the trust was under financial review. The report frames the figure as an efficiency question, not as a staff benefit. So this is simultaneously a genuine advantage for teachers currently working there and a fair question about how sustainable it is. Both things are true.

Even with those caveats, we would rate this as the most valuable single piece of workload evidence we have found for any trust. It is quantified, it comes from an external adviser rather than the employer's marketing, and it is measured against a stated benchmark. Almost every other trust's workload claim is an adjective.

The same report discloses a pay-relevant recruitment constraint the trust faces: some of its Outer London schools are "geographically ... very close to inner London and therefore are having to compete with those rates being higher". That is a candid acknowledgement that the trust loses ground to inner London schools on salary in some locations — a real thing to weigh if you are choosing between an Outer London TEFAT school and an inner London post a short distance away, where the regional band difference is far larger than any trust-level variation.

Union recognition and facility time

TEFAT publishes a Trade Union Agreement, and paragraph 31 contains a commitment in the same family as the one Oasis makes, though slightly weaker in its wording:

"TEFAT will employ staff on the national or local terms and conditions ... and will not move away from these arrangements without consultation and negotiation."

The threshold there is "consultation and negotiation" rather than agreement, which is a genuine difference: a process obligation rather than a consent requirement. It is still considerably more than most trusts commit to in writing, and it is consistent with everything else in the pay policy.

The agreement names ATL, NAHT, NASUWT and NUT for teachers, and GMB, UNISON and Unite for support staff. It establishes full collective bargaining through a trust-wide National Joint Committee, with ACAS escalation available where the parties fail to agree.

On facility time, the disclosed figures for 2024-25 are 11 officials, 9.12 full-time equivalent, at a cost of £14,398.82 against a total pay bill of £77.87 million — roughly 0.02 per cent. That is a real disclosed figure rather than an estimate, and it is substantially lower as a proportion than Oasis Community Learning's 0.11 per cent. Facility time ratios are not a perfect proxy for union strength, and a trust with no disputes has less call on released time than one with several — TEFAT, notably, has had no strike or pay dispute that we could find. But a low ratio does mean fewer reps with less released time, which matters on the day you need one.

Turnover ranges from 0% to 58.3%

The SRMA report the trust published also discloses staff turnover school by school, which is data almost no employer of this size makes public. The trust average is 18.03 per cent. The range behind that average is the finding.

A school that lost no staff at all in a year and a school that lost more than half of them are not variations on a theme. They are different jobs, with different levels of stability, different amounts of institutional knowledge in the building, and almost certainly very different day-to-day experiences of workload — because when half a staff turns over, the people who remain absorb the cost.

Every trust-level page on this site carries a warning that a trust average tells you little about the specific school you would work in. TEFAT has, unusually, published the data that proves the point. The practical conclusion is that "is The Elliot Foundation a good trust to work for?" is close to the wrong question. The right question is what turnover looks like at the specific school you are applying to, and it is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask at interview — particularly at a trust that has already published the figure for itself.

The same report notes that 83 per cent of support staff joined with less than two years' continuous local authority service, which points to a support workforce that is relatively new to the sector rather than long-tenured. For a teacher, that matters through the experience level of the teaching assistants and support staff you will be working alongside.

CEO pay, and what the CEO has said about it

Chief executive pay at TEFAT has a documented history, and unusually the chief executive has said a number of quotable things about pay in public that are genuinely informative about how the trust thinks.

Tes reported on 29 January 2020 that the pay of chief executive Hugh Greenway had risen from £169,720 to £202,805 — an increase of roughly 20 per cent — at a time when TEFAT was among 146 trusts asked by the Education and Skills Funding Agency to justify chief executive pay above £150,000. Greenway's response, as reported, was that it was not for him to defend, as it was not his decision. That is technically accurate — executive pay at a trust is set by a board committee, not by the executive — and it is also a fairly striking thing to say publicly.

Schools Week reported on 25 March 2022 that Greenway had agreed with unions to raise pay for everyone but himself that year. And on 16 September 2022, Schools Week covered an unusual job advert he had written himself for a £110,000 role, which opened by trying to talk applicants out of applying: "I am grateful for your interest, but I am going to try and discourage you from applying". The advert described school leaders as "exhausted", amid "unfunded pay increases and utilities bills spiralling into unaffordability".

That quote is worth more than its novelty value. There is a common assumption that academy trust leaders want pay freedom in order to hold pay down, or to compete on it. Greenway's public position is neither: he has argued against unfunded pay pressure being pushed onto schools, which is an argument for the government funding pay awards properly rather than an argument for trust-level pay flexibility. Read alongside a pay policy that makes progression automatic and rules out affordability as a reason to withhold it, that reads as consistent rather than contradictory.

Current disclosed chief executive pay sits in the £240,000 to £245,000 band. The executive pay disclosure also states that the trust does not operate a bonus scheme, and that there is no provision for enhanced redundancy payments — both of which are real, stated facts worth knowing.

Financial pressure and the gender pay gap

Two more pieces of context that anyone joining should have.

On finances, Schools Week reported on 19 January 2024 that TEFAT was running a £1.5 million in-year deficit, with Greenway quoted as saying: "Were we to start the Elliot Foundation now, we would not be primary only." That is a chief executive naming the structural problem with his own organisation — primary-only trusts carry the same central overheads as secondary-inclusive trusts but across schools with far smaller budgets. It is the same pressure the SRMA review was responding to, and the backdrop against which a 68.2 per cent contact ratio and a policy ruling out affordability as a reason to withhold progression should both be read.

On the gender pay gap, a 2023 snapshot shows a median gap of 31.23 per cent and a mean gap of 25.46 per cent. Those are large numbers and we are reporting them as disclosed. They are, however, very likely to be a composition effect rather than unequal pay for the same work. The gender pay gap measures the difference between the average pay of all men and all women in an organisation, regardless of role. In a workforce that is 91.28 per cent female, the relatively small number of men will be distributed differently across the pay structure than the large number of women — and the structural pattern in primary education is a workforce with many part-time, term-time and support roles at the lower end, which are overwhelmingly filled by women, sitting beneath a leadership layer where the male share is proportionally higher.

What's verified and what isn't

The evidential status of everything above, stated explicitly.

• Well evidenced: the automatic, non-performance-linked progression commitment and the exclusion of funding constraints, quoted directly from the trust's published Pay Policy (All Staff) 2025/26, adopted by the board in March 2026.
• Well evidenced: the three-part capability test at sections 5.8, 5.12 and 5.14 that qualifies the automatic progression principle, and the maternity and long-term sickness protection at section 5.26.
• Well evidenced: the 5% TEFAT uplift to national leadership values at section 4.5, and the 15% ceiling on further annual enhancements stated there.
• Well evidenced: the 68.2% teacher contact ratio and the 76–78% benchmark, the 18.03% average turnover and the 0.0%–58.3% school-level range, all disclosed in the DfE SRMA report the trust self-published.
• Well evidenced: the recognition agreement wording and named unions, and the 2024-25 facility time disclosure of 11 officials / 9.12 FTE at £14,398.82.
• Well evidenced: the reported CEO pay history and direct quotes, all from dated Tes and Schools Week articles published between 2020 and 2024.

• Not verified — and this is the important one: the actual TEFAT classroom teacher pay scale values. Appendix D, which the pay policy says contains them, is absent from the published document. We make no claim about whether TEFAT pay is above, at, or below the national scale.
• Unresolved: the 15% versus 25% leadership uplift ceiling. Two of the trust's own published documents state different figures. Our suggested reconciliation — substantive range enhancement versus additional payments — is our inference, not the trust's explanation.
• Not found: an explicit statement of the 1,265-hour directed time limit. The policy handles directed time by reference back to the STPCD and uses the standard 1/195th daily rate, which implies the national framework applies, but it is implied rather than stated.
• Not found: the Health and Wellbeing Policy cross-referenced in the Appraisal Policy. A referenced but unpublished policy is a real gap.
• Not found: a published workload charter.
• Dates from 2012: the recognition agreement, which does not name the NEU. Recognition of the successor union is very likely but is not evidenced in the document.

One further point of fairness. Several of the less flattering findings on this page — the turnover range, the contact ratio framing, the financial deficit — exist only because TEFAT published documents about itself that no trust is obliged to publish. A trust that published nothing would have a shorter and blander page here. That is worth holding in mind when comparing this profile against one where we simply could not find out.

How to check the position before you apply

This trust gives you more to work with than almost any other, so the checks are more specific than usual.

One last note on what this trust offers beyond pay. Its 2024 Flexible Working Policy goes beyond the statutory minimum, including training for managers handling requests and an explicit no-detriment clause for staff who make one. For support staff facing redundancy there is salary safeguarding for three years, tapering at 100 per cent, 60 per cent and 40 per cent — though the executive pay disclosure confirms there is no provision for enhanced redundancy payments anywhere in the trust. See our guide to teacher redundancy pay for what the statutory baseline looks like.