Greenwood Academies Trust Teacher Pay (2026/27)

Greenwood Academies Trust is one of the less-examined large multi-academy trusts in England. It does not run a branded above-scale allowance to publicise, it has not been through a headline-grabbing strike ballot, and its careers pages read like most others in the sector — a generous benefits list, warm language about wellbeing, and no trust-specific pay scale to scrutinise. That combination usually means there is little to say. Here, there is one thing worth saying clearly: a documented, if dated, finding that a meaningful minority of GAT teachers who were eligible for a pay rise did not get one, and that the gap was not evenly spread across the workforce.

This page sets out what GAT actually pays, what the pay-progression finding does and does not tell you, what has changed at the trust since (including its Ofsted history and its executive pay), and what to ask before you accept a post there. We have tried to be precise about how old each piece of evidence is, because on this trust more than most, the dates matter as much as the numbers.

What Greenwood Academies Trust actually is

GAT was established on 31 March 2009, growing out of Nottingham Academy (formerly Greenwood Dale School), and is headquartered at Greenwood House on the Colwick Quays Business Park in Nottingham. Its own website states that it now runs 38 academies educating around 19,000 pupils, across seven local authority areas: Nottingham City, Nottinghamshire, Leicester City, Northamptonshire, Peterborough and Lincolnshire. The Department for Education's own register of academy trusts shows a very similar, slightly earlier snapshot of 37 academies and around 18,000 pupils across the same footprint — the kind of small discrepancy you would expect from a trust that is still slowly growing, not a disagreement about scale. Either figure makes GAT one of the larger multi-academy trusts in England, and its schools span primary, secondary, all-through and special provision, with clusters around Nottingham and Mansfield, the Lincolnshire coast around Skegness, Northamptonshire and Peterborough.

Wayne Norrie OBE has led GAT as chief executive since 2016. That tenure matters for context later on this page: it means the same leadership has overseen both the trust's difficult 2016/17 Ofsted period and its more recent improvement, and the same leadership's pay has been the subject of separate, unrelated scrutiny from the Department for Education.

National STPCD pay, not a distinct scale

Start with the part of this page that is straightforward. GAT does not run a bespoke, trust-specific pay scale. NASUWT's own tracking of the trust's pay awards over several years describes GAT following the School Teachers' Review Body's recommended percentage uplifts directly — for example, applying 3.5% to the Main Scale and 2% to the Upper Pay Scale, Leading Practitioner Scale and allowances in one reported award year, and a flat 2.75% cost-of-living uplift across every point of every scale in another. That is the behaviour of a trust implementing the national pay recommendation as published, not one negotiating its own settlement.

Live recruitment evidence supports the same conclusion. A Class Teacher (Post 16) vacancy at Purple Oaks Academy, one of GAT's schools, was advertised at £32,916–£51,048, quoted directly as "MPS/UPS + SEN allowance" — the standard Main Pay Range and Upper Pay Range point structure, plus the standard SEN allowance band (currently £2,885 to £5,690 nationally), rather than any GAT-specific uplift. Those figures reflect the scale in place at the time the advert was live, which will typically be a year or so behind the current STPCD values — the confirmed 2026/27 national range runs from £34,069 at M1 to £46,940 at the top of the main range and £52,835 at the top of the upper range — but the structure quoted on the advert is the national one, not a translated GAT equivalent. Elsewhere, GAT's own recruitment material describes offering staff "nationally agreed terms and conditions" alongside its benefits package, which is as direct a statement as a trust can make that it is not trying to beat the scale.

The pay progression question

This is the substantive finding on this page, and it deserves to be stated carefully rather than either inflated or buried.

NASUWT periodically requests equality data on pay progression from multi-academy trusts, using its right under the Public Sector Equality Duty to ask how progression outcomes break down by protected characteristic. In a bulletin covering Greenwood Academies Trust, the union reported that data supplied by the trust showed just 71.2% of teachers who were eligible for pay progression across the whole chain actually received it that year. NASUWT's stated concern was not simply the headline rate but how unevenly it was distributed: male teachers progressed at a lower rate (67%) than female teachers (73%), and teachers aged 30 to 39 and 40 to 49 progressed at a lower rate (65%) than colleagues outside those age bands who were also eligible.

We want to be exact about the provenance and the age of this, because it is the single most important caveat on this page. The figures come from a NASUWT bulletin that also references pay-award context — a flat 2.75% cost-of-living uplift, and a separate description of a 3.5%/2%/2%/1.5%/2% STPCD award pattern — that points to the underlying data covering somewhere around the 2018/19 or 2019/20 academic year. NASUWT issued a very similar bulletin, using the same format and requesting the same equality data, to a large number of trusts around that period. We tried to open the original PDF directly to confirm the exact date and read the full text in context, and could not — the specific document no longer resolves on NASUWT's own site, and what survives is what search engines indexed from it before it was taken down or moved. That is a real limitation, and we are stating it rather than smoothing over it.

What follows from that is straightforward: the 71.2% figure is a genuine, specific, sourced finding — not a rumour and not invented — but it is roughly six or seven years old at the time of writing, not a current statistic. We searched specifically for a more recent NASUWT or NEU progression figure for GAT, and for any Schools Week or Tes coverage of the finding, and found none. That absence cuts both ways. It might mean the issue was addressed and stopped generating union commentary. It might equally mean nobody has asked the same question again, or the answer was less newsworthy. We cannot tell you which from public sources, and anyone telling you with confidence that GAT's progression rate today is either fine or still a problem is going beyond the evidence.

What GAT says today vs what the data showed

The other reason this finding is worth including is the contrast with GAT's own current recruitment material. The trust's employee benefits page, live at the time of writing, lists "automatic pay progression" as one of its staff benefits, alongside a stated commitment to workload principles and directed-time guidance for teaching staff. Read on its own, that sounds like exactly the kind of policy that should produce a progression rate close to 100% for anyone not in formal capability proceedings — similar in spirit to the automatic-progression model published by E-ACT.

We do not know whether GAT's current practice matches that description, because we could not find a published, dated GAT Teachers' Pay Policy to check the wording against, and we could not find recent progression data to test the claim against outcomes. What we can say is that the same trust, several years earlier, supplied data to NASUWT showing a materially lower real-world rate than "automatic" would suggest, with a clear demographic skew. That does not mean the same gap exists today. It does mean "automatic pay progression" is a claim worth testing rather than taking at face value, and it is a specific, answerable question to put to the trust: what proportion of eligible teachers actually progressed last year, and can that be broken down the way NASUWT once asked for it to be.

Executive pay and the cost of leadership

Executive pay at GAT has its own, separate history, and it is worth including for balance rather than as an accusation. Chief executive Wayne Norrie had, according to reporting at the time, declined incremental salary increases since taking the role in 2016. In January 2022, Schools Week reported that his pay had subsequently risen to at least £190,000, an increase of at least £20,000 over the preceding two years, with a trust spokesperson describing the adjustment as bringing his pay "in line with rigorous national benchmarking and cost of living increases nationally." That reporting presented GAT as a contrasting example of rising executive pay within a wider story focused on a different trust cutting its own chief executive's salary — it was not framed as GAT being criticised in isolation.

More recently, the Department for Education wrote to a large number of academy trusts, GAT included, from November 2025 onward, about the pay of their highest-paid executive as reported in the trust's 2023/24 accounts return. That was a wide, routine sweep — roughly fifty trusts were on the same list, and the DfE's own published correspondence gives no trust-specific reason for the contact — so it should not be read as a finding against GAT specifically. We were not able to find GAT's current, up-to-date chief executive salary figure from its most recent published accounts; the exercise here is to flag executive pay as a line of inquiry, not to state a current number we could not verify.

The reason to mention this alongside the pay progression finding is simply proportionality. A trust whose chief executive's pay has risen into the £190,000-plus range while a documented historical snapshot shows around three-in-ten eligible teachers missing out on their own annual progression is not necessarily doing anything improper — trust-wide executive salaries and individual teacher progression decisions are governed by different processes — but it is the kind of contrast that a teacher weighing up an offer is entitled to know about and factor in.

From special measures to recent improvement

GAT's Ofsted history is genuinely two different stories separated by close to a decade, and both halves matter.

Taken together, that is a trust whose 2016/17 record was genuinely poor by Ofsted's own account, and whose more recent, individual inspection outcomes look considerably better — including at a school that had just joined from outside and improved quickly under GAT's stewardship. With 38 academies of very different starting points, a single trust-level judgement was never going to be meaningful; the only reliable check is the current Ofsted report for the specific school you are applying to, which you can look up on Ofsted's own report service in a couple of minutes.

The rest of the package

GAT's published staff benefits are reasonably typical of a large multi-academy trust, with a few specifics worth noting.

• Teachers' Pension Scheme for teaching staff, described by the trust as a "generous public sector pension" — the standard, unmodified TPS rather than any substitute arrangement.
• Automatic pay progression, stated as a benefit on the trust's current careers page — see the caveats above about how this squares with the historical NASUWT data.
• A benefits marketplace offering several hundred retail and lifestyle discounts, alongside a free digital wellbeing companion for all staff.
• A free, 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme providing confidential support, and trust-funded training for staff to qualify as Mental Health First Aiders.
• Workload principles and directed-time guidance for teaching staff, plus dedicated professional supervision for academy leaders — a specific, if unquantified, workload commitment that many trusts do not publish at all.
• A dedicated Early Career Teacher support programme, on top of the statutory ECF entitlement.
• Childcare cost savings, family-friendly time-off policies, free parking and eye-care support