Harris Federation Teacher Pay Explained (2026/27)

The Harris Federation is one of the few English academy trusts where the pay position can be established with confidence — the allowance is published, quantified and printed on live adverts — and simultaneously one where the conditions position is the most documented and the most contested. Those two facts pull in opposite directions, and a page that reported only the first would be misleading.

It is also, unusually, a trust where the conditions position has demonstrably moved. A formal strike ballot in early 2025 produced a set of concessions that changed how teachers at Harris are paid and progressed, and any account of the trust that stops at the 2024 findings is out of date. Both halves are on this page.

So this page is structured around the trade rather than the headline. Harris pays more than a maintained London school, in cash, on top of a scale you already understand. It has also been the subject of a large, organised union campaign about workload and directed time, a set of findings about hours worked well beyond the statutory cap, and — more recently — a redundancy programme running alongside some of the highest executive pay in the sector. All of that is on the record, and all of it is relevant to someone deciding whether to apply.

What the Harris Federation actually is

Harris is a large London-focused multi-academy trust, running primary, secondary and sixth-form provision concentrated in South London and the surrounding boroughs, with a substantial cluster in Croydon. Unlike trusts with a national footprint, essentially the whole Harris estate sits within Inner or Outer London pay territory — which is why its allowance is structured around those two bands and why it has no "national rate" equivalent.

That concentration has two consequences worth understanding. First, Harris competes for staff almost entirely against other London schools, including maintained schools paying the same underlying scale — so a flat cash allowance is a direct, legible recruitment weapon in a way a percentage uplift would not be. Second, because the schools are geographically close and unionised in a coordinated way, collective organisation across the trust has been more effective than at a dispersed network. The 2024 NEU campaign described later on this page is a direct product of that geography.

The Harris Allowance: what it is and what it's worth

The trust's own benefits page states the allowance in plain terms: "£2,000 for Inner London academies, and £1,500 for Outer London academies", paid to teaching staff on top of the standard pay scale. It appears on adverts in exactly that form — the trust's listings on the DfE's Teaching Vacancies service routinely quote salaries such as "MPS (Outer London) + £1,500 Harris Allowance".

That level of transparency is genuinely rare and it is worth saying so. With most trusts the honest answer to "what do they pay?" is that you cannot find out until you have an offer. With Harris you can check a live advert in two minutes and see the allowance stated as a separate line.

Here is what it is worth in proportional terms, set against the illustrative 2026/27 London pay points used elsewhere on this site. The percentages are our arithmetic on those illustrative figures, not Harris's.

Two features of a flat allowance fall straight out of that table. It is worth proportionally most to the least experienced teachers — around 4.8% of an Inner London ECT salary, decaying to about 3.1% at the top of the Upper Pay Range. And it does not compound: unlike a percentage uplift, it stays at £2,000 whether you are on M1 or U3, and it does not grow with the annual pay award unless the trust separately uprates it.

In take-home terms, £2,000 gross is roughly £100 to £115 a month in the hand for a typical London teacher after income tax, National Insurance and pension contributions — model your own position with our take-home pay calculator. Real money, and more than Ark's 2.5 per cent is worth on a main scale point, but less than United Learning's entry-level differential.

National scale plus an allowance, not its own scale

This is a structural point that makes Harris meaningfully easier to evaluate than most above-scale trusts, and it deserves its own section. Harris does not run a bespoke pay structure. Where United Learning replaces M1–M6 and U1–U3 with its own PT and EPT bands — so that comparing an offer against a maintained school requires translating between two different scales — Harris pays the recognisable national London ranges and adds a visible separate line on top.

The practical benefits of that are real. You know exactly which point you are on. You can compare a Harris offer against a maintained school offer in the same borough by looking at one number. When the national pay award lands, you know what it means for you. And you are not dependent on a trust-specific progression framework whose band boundaries only that trust uses.

On the union side, NASUWT holds a formal recognition agreement with Harris and operates a Harris Academies National Joint Consultative Committee, a standing negotiating and consultation body covering the trust. NASUWT's published guidance on the Harris Federation states its position that members should receive at least the equivalent pay award to teachers in other maintained schools. Standing machinery of that kind is a genuine point in the trust's favour relative to trusts that set pay unilaterally with nothing to negotiate through.

The directed time problem

Here is the counterweight, and it is substantial enough that we would treat it as the headline finding of this page rather than a caveat attached to the pay section.

In February 2025, Warwick Mansell published an analysis in Education Uncovered asking whether the extra pay in several well-known academy contracts is actually a good deal once the additional contracted time is counted. On Harris specifically, it found that the up-to-£2,000 allowance came alongside around 30 additional directed-time hours a year compared with a standard national contract. The piece noted the National Education Union's advice to members to keep national contracts where they have the option.

Thirty hours for £2,000 is, taken at face value, not a bad trade. It works out at roughly £67 an hour in Inner London and £50 in Outer London before tax, which is well above what a teacher's directed hour is otherwise worth. If that were the whole picture, the honest verdict would be that Harris is selling extra time at a fair price.

It is not the whole picture. In February 2024, Inside Croydon reported that more than 1,000 Harris teachers and support staff had signed an NEU letter calling for improved pay and conditions. The findings in that campaign are the ones that change the arithmetic:

• One Harris school tracked at roughly 200 hours over the 1,265-hour limit — the equivalent of around six additional weeks of working time in a single year.
• Overruns of about 100 hours — some three weeks — described as "not uncommon" across the trust, rather than confined to a single outlier school.
• Most Harris schools reported as having no PPA time protected on timetables, meaning planning, preparation and assessment time could be absorbed into other duties.
• Teachers reporting 53-hour working weeks, well above the national average for the profession.
• 55% of Harris teachers reporting being stressed "very often", alongside 49% of support staff.

Those are union-gathered figures from a live industrial campaign, and they should be read with that provenance in mind — a union surveying its own members during a dispute is not a neutral instrument. But they are specific, they were reported contemporaneously, and no public rebuttal of the directed time numbers appears in the record.

The reason to set it out this way is that the allowance is fixed and the hours have not reliably been. £2,000 for 30 extra hours is a good rate. £2,000 for 230 extra hours is under £9 an hour, which is below the national minimum wage. Nothing in the published arrangement prevents the second outcome at an individual school; what prevents it is a directed time calendar that is negotiated, published and adhered to. That is why asking to see the school's directed time calendar matters more here than at almost any other trust.

The next two sections are the counterweight to the counterweight. Members at these schools organised around exactly this problem, balloted, and won a set of changes — including a guaranteed PPA percentage — that go directly to it. The panel above describes the position the campaign was fought over, not necessarily the position today.

What the NEU campaign won

It would be incomplete and unfair to report the 2024 findings without reporting what happened next, because the campaign appears to have succeeded.

The NEU's "Harris Educators Stand Up" campaign ran negotiations with the Harris Federation executive over a year on workload, pay fairness, and the treatment of Caribbean and overseas-trained teachers. Its four stated demands were the ones set out in the Inside Croydon report: more PPA time, protected on timetables; adherence to the 1,265-hour directed time limit from the national contract; automatic pay progression for teachers; and an inner-London living wage of £23,300 as a floor for support staff.

Two of those concessions deserve a moment. Ending performance-related pay across the trust is a bigger change than it sounds: the specific grievance was an unnegotiated requirement that pupil progress must at least be in line with national standards before a teacher could progress, which the union said had resulted in teachers being denied progression on the strength of one exam class. Removing that removes the mechanism. And a guaranteed 12 per cent of working time for PPA is a floor expressed as a proportion rather than a vague commitment, which makes it checkable against a timetable.

The overseas-trained teacher pay gap

This was the third strand of the dispute and, in cash terms, the largest single pay issue anywhere on this page. It is also the part of the Harris story least covered elsewhere, so it is worth setting out properly.

Harris, like many London trusts facing shortage subjects, has recruited substantial numbers of teachers from overseas — the NEU's campaign material focuses particularly on teachers recruited from Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean. The problem was not the recruitment; it was the pay treatment on arrival. A teacher qualified and experienced in another country does not automatically hold English qualified teacher status, and the trust placed such teachers on the unqualified teacher scale regardless of how many years they had taught. More than 50 Harris overseas-trained teachers organised through the NEU and described the financial, professional and emotional consequences: the union's account is that they were often paid around £10,000 a year less than UK-trained colleagues doing the same job, and that some waited years to be put on a path to QTS at all.

The comparison that makes the scale of this clear is on this site's own scales. The unqualified teacher range and the main pay range are different scales, and the gap between them at the experienced end is large. Set the top of the unqualified range against the top of the main range in Inner London and you are looking at a difference of roughly £11,702 a year for the same classroom job — and unqualified-scale years accrue a smaller pension under the career average scheme, so the loss compounds well beyond the salary itself.

If you are an overseas-trained teacher considering a Harris post, this is the section to act on. Ask, in writing, which scale you are being appointed to; if it is the unqualified scale, ask exactly how the top-up is calculated, what evidence of prior experience it is based on, and whether it is pensionable. Ask when you will be able to start the QTS process and what the trust commits to in supporting it. These arrangements were won in 2025 and are, as far as we can establish, still trust policy — but Harris does not publish them, so the only way to hold the trust to them is to have them confirmed in your offer letter. The NEU's general guidance for overseas-trained teachers is a useful reference for what good practice looks like.

One piece of context the union put alongside the dispute, which we report with its provenance attached: the NEU stated that a quarter of Harris teachers — 27 per cent — left their school at the end of the summer term in 2023, against roughly one in seven, 15 per cent, in local authority maintained schools. That is a union figure used in a live campaign rather than an independently audited statistic, but it is specific, and high turnover is the mechanism by which workload problems and pay grievances become visible from outside.

Beyond salary: the rest of the package

Harris publishes an unusually detailed benefits list, and it is one of the stronger ones in the sector on the non-pay side. These figures are all stated by Harris on its own benefits page.

• Loyalty bonus, tiered by service and paid in the December salary — £50 at one year, £100 at two, £150 at three, £200 at four and £250 at five or more years. Modest in cash terms, but explicitly structured as a retention payment, which tells you something about where the trust sees its pressure point.
• Teachers' Pension Scheme for teaching staff, with the Local Government Pension Scheme for support staff — the LGPS building up at 1/49 accrual with what Harris describes as an average 20% employer contribution. That is a genuinely strong support staff pension.
• Life assurance of 3x pensionable pay, included via the pension scheme.
• Wellbeing cash plan covering optician check-ups, dental treatment, physiotherapy, acupuncture and specialist consultations — and notably extending to children up to age 18, with partner cover and upgrades available at additional cost. The child cover is unusual and worth real money to staff with families.
• AXA Health employee assistance programme, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, covering family, financial and legal matters plus stress, anxiety and bereavement counselling.
• Interest-free loans — up to £3,500 for a season ticket, repayable over the year, and up to £2,000 for ICT equipment over 12 or 24 months. For a London commuter the season ticket loan alone is a meaningful saving on financing costs.
• Retail discounts — including a 20% Tapi Carpets discount and 10–15% off school uniforms from specified suppliers.

Taken together, the benefits package is a real part of the offer rather than window dressing, and on the support staff side the LGPS terms and life assurance are strong. What the package does not contain, as far as we could establish, is anything addressing the workload question — there is no sabbatical scheme, no published flexible working commitment, and no housing or relocation support that we could find.

Redundancies and executive pay

A development from April 2026 that anyone considering a Harris post should factor in. Tes reported on 20 April 2026 that more than 70 roles were at risk of redundancy across 12 Harris secondary schools — 44 teaching posts and 29 support staff posts.

The stated driver is demographic rather than performance-related: Year 7 demand across the trust's schools is forecast to fall by 7.6 per cent over four years, with some individual schools facing shortfalls of around £800,000. Falling rolls in London are a real, sector-wide phenomenon driven by declining birth rates and out-migration from the capital, and Harris is far from the only London trust affected. Any large London trust is likely to be managing the same pressure over the next few years.

What made the Harris announcement contentious was the contrast with executive pay. The same reporting recorded chief executive Sir Dan Moynihan's pay at £530,000 to £535,000, with six other senior staff paid over £200,000, and total senior management pay at £4.6 million in 2024-25, up from £4.1 million the previous year. NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede said that if Harris wished to make savings, "they should look at the hugely inflated pay of their senior leaders". NASUWT general secretary Matt Wrack called the situation "utterly disgraceful".

There is one piece of useful precedent here. This was not the trust's first redundancy round: in June 2025 Schools Week reported that an earlier Harris consultation which had put 45 roles at risk across its secondaries ended with 15 actual redundancies, with some affected staff redeployed. A consultation figure is a starting position, not an outcome, and at this trust the gap between the two has previously been large. That is genuinely reassuring on one level and not on another — redeployment across a network is a real advantage a large trust has, but being redeployed is not the same as keeping your job.

What it's like to work at Harris

Review-site data is weak evidence about any large employer. It is self-selected, skews toward people with strong feelings, and blends dozens of very different schools into a single number. We would normally present it with heavy qualification and move on. In this case the numbers are far enough outside the normal range that they are worth reporting plainly.

Harris's Glassdoor profile shows approximately 23 per cent of reviewers saying they would recommend the employer to a friend, with work-life balance around 2.2 out of 5, culture and values around 2.5, and career opportunities around 2.9. For context, Ark Schools sits at roughly 3.8 overall with 3.3 for work-life balance, and United Learning at around 62 per cent recommending with 3.1 for work-life balance. There are also around 116 reviews on Indeed if you want a second, differently-selected sample.

A 23 per cent recommendation rate is low in absolute terms and low relative to comparable trusts, and it lines up uncomfortably well with the independent directed-time findings and the 55 per cent "stressed very often" figure from the NEU survey. When three sources of different provenance — a union survey, an independent journalist's contract analysis, and an anonymous review aggregate — point in the same direction, that convergence carries more weight than any one of them alone.

The counterweight, and it is a fair one: Harris runs a large number of schools in genuinely challenging London contexts, many with strong outcomes, and trusts doing difficult work in difficult communities tend to attract harder reviews than trusts in comfortable catchments. Individual Harris academies vary enormously. A trust-level number of 23 per cent does not tell you what one specific school is like, and the only way to find that out is to visit it, talk to the staff who work there now, and ask to speak to the union rep.

What we couldn't verify

Being explicit about the gaps matters more here than usual, because Harris publishes less about its employment terms than any comparable trust we have looked at.

• Well evidenced: the Harris Allowance at £2,000 Inner London and £1,500 Outer London, stated by the trust and repeated on live adverts.
• Well evidenced: the benefits package — loyalty bonus tiers, TPS and LGPS arrangements, 3x life assurance, wellbeing cash plan, AXA Health EAP, and the £2,000 ICT and £3,500 season ticket loans.
• Well evidenced: the April 2026 redundancy consultation covering 70+ roles and the executive pay figures, from contemporaneous Tes reporting.
• Well evidenced: the formal NEU strike ballot — over 700 members, 18 secondaries and sixth forms, opened late January 2025, closing 28 February 2025 — reported by Schools Week on 24 January 2025 and by the NEU itself.
• Well evidenced: the end of the practice of paying experienced overseas-trained teachers on the unqualified scale, and the introduction of a top-up plus early access to the QTS process, reported by Education Uncovered on 4 March 2025.
• Reported and specific, but from a union campaign during a live dispute: the 200-hour and 100-hour directed time overruns, the 53-hour weeks, the 55% stress figure, the £10,000 overseas-trained teacher pay gap and the 27% turnover figure.

• Not found: any published Harris teachers' pay policy. The trust's policies and documents page lists no employment-terms documents.
• Not found: any published conditions of service or directed time policy, which means the current post-campaign position cannot be checked from outside.
• Not verified: the text of the 2025 concessions. We could not find a Harris document confirming that performance-related pay has ended, setting out the 12% PPA guarantee, or describing how the overseas-trained teacher top-up is calculated — all of it comes from the NEU and from Education Uncovered's reporting of the settlement.
• Not verified: whether the 2025 concessions still stand unchanged. They were agreed over eighteen months before this page was last reviewed, through a suspended ballot rather than a signed collective agreement published by the trust.
• Not verified: whether the Harris Allowance is pensionable, how it is pro-rated for part-time staff, or whether it is uprated annually.
• Not verified: whether the allowance applies to the Upper Pay Range and leadership posts on the same terms as the Main Pay Range.
• Not found: any sabbatical scheme, housing scheme or relocation support.

What changes under the 2026 Act

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, and extends the School Teachers' Review Body's remit to cover academies. The timing is widely misreported: Section 59 and Schedule 3 commenced on 29 June 2026, giving the Secretary of State the power to make a minimum remuneration order, but academies are only actually required to pay the floor once that order is made — which the Department for Education has said will be no earlier than September 2026, and which had not happened at the time of writing. The September 2027 date often quoted alongside this Act is for a separate provision, QTS becoming a requirement in academies. A government amendment confirmed that the floor is a floor and not a ceiling.

For Harris specifically, the pay-floor element changes very little: the trust already pays the national London ranges and adds money on top, so it clears any floor by construction. The interesting part is the other half. Having regard to the whole STPCD means having regard to its conditions provisions, including the 1,265-hour directed time limit across 195 days — which is exactly the provision that the documented Harris overruns went beyond, and exactly the one the NEU campaign was fought over.

How strong a duty "have regard to" turns out to be in practice is not yet settled and will probably be worked out through statutory guidance rather than the Act itself. But the direction of travel is towards the national directed-time framework applying more, not less, to trusts like this one. If you are weighing a Harris post for the long term, that is a point in the favourable column.

How to check before you apply

Because Harris publishes so little about its employment terms, the burden of checking falls more heavily on the applicant here than at most trusts. None of the following are awkward questions, and the way they are answered tells you nearly as much as the answers themselves.

• Ask to see the school's directed time calendar. This is the single most important question on this page. How many directed hours does it total? Is it published to staff? Was it negotiated with union reps? A school comfortably inside 1,265 hours will have no difficulty showing you.
• Ask what the post-campaign policies say. Ask by name for the directed time policy, the pay progression policy and whatever document records the 2025 ACAS settlement, and read what they actually commit to rather than accepting a verbal summary.
• Ask whether the 12% PPA guarantee applies at this school, and how it is calculated. Specifically whether PPA is timetabled and protected from being used for cover, meetings or duties — that was one of the four campaign demands, it was conceded in 2025 as a percentage of working time, and it is the one most easily eroded in practice.
• Ask whether performance-related pay has actually gone. The 2025 settlement reportedly ended it trust-wide. Ask what the current progression criteria are, in writing, and whether any pupil-outcome measure still features in them.
• If you are an overseas-trained teacher, ask about the scale and the top-up explicitly. Which scale are you being appointed to; if it is the unqualified scale, how is the top-up calculated, is it pensionable, and when can you begin the QTS process? Get all of it in the offer letter.
• Confirm the allowance in writing — the amount, whether it is pensionable, whether it is pro-rated for part-time, and whether it applies to your pay range. It is quoted on adverts, so getting it confirmed in the offer letter should be straightforward.
• Ask which pay point you are being offered, not just "MPS (Outer London)". A range from M1 to U3 covers a spread of nearly £17,000 and tells you nothing about your own salary.
• Ask about pay progression. Automatic progression was one of the campaign demands — establish what the current arrangement is and what evidence is required.
• Ask about restructuring and job security given the April 2026 redundancy consultation. Has this school been affected? What is the redeployment policy across the trust?
• Ask whether there is a recognised union rep at the school and speak to them. Harris has formal NASUWT recognition and a national JCC, and active NEU organisation. A school with an engaged rep is a better-protected school.

And then apply the general principle that runs through this whole section of the site: compare the full package, not the headline. £2,000 on top of a national London salary is a real improvement on a maintained school offer if the hours are the same. If they are not, the arithmetic can reverse entirely, and only the directed time calendar for the specific school will tell you which situation you are walking into.