Lift Schools (Academies Enterprise Trust) Teacher Pay Explained

This is a harder page to write than most trust profiles, because Lift Schools has a genuinely mixed public record and because it changed its name in the middle of that record. The honest approach is to lay out what is documented, attribute every claim, separate the historic from the current, and let a reader weigh it. A trust is not defined by its worst year, and a rebrand is not evidence of anything on its own. But a teacher researching an employer deserves to know what is in the file.

The name change, verified at Companies House

If you have searched for "Academies Enterprise Trust pay" and landed here, you are in the right place. These are not two organisations. They are one company with two names.

Companies House records show that company number 06625091 was originally registered as Academies Enterprise Trust and officially changed its name to Lift Schools on 22 August 2024. The rebrand was announced publicly on 3 September 2024. Schools Week reported that the new branding cost £45,000, and noted that the trust would not disclose the full cost of the name change.

The legal continuity is the point. Nothing about the trust's identity, its contracts, its accounts or its history reset with the name. The same registered company that received a Financial Notice to Improve from the DfE in 2014, and that faced a coordinated union dispute across roughly 60 schools in 2019, is the company operating under the Lift Schools name today. Employment contracts issued as AET remain contracts with the same employer.

None of this implies the rebrand was done to obscure anything — organisations rename for perfectly ordinary reasons, and a trust that has changed leadership and strategy may reasonably want a name that reflects it. But a reader should know the two names refer to one employer, and should read the whole file rather than the recent half of it.

What Lift Schools actually is

Lift Schools is one of the largest multi-academy trusts in England, running primary, secondary and special schools across a wide geographic spread. As with REAch2, the basic question of how many schools it runs does not have one answer.

We are reporting the spread rather than picking one figure, because each source is a snapshot from a different date with slightly different inclusion rules and trusts transfer schools continuously. What is not in dispute is the scale of the employer.

Around 4,690 staff are employed on average, with annual staff costs of roughly £216.1m and 469 staff earning over £60,000. The accounts also disclose 25 severance payments in the relevant period, including eight classed as "special severance" payments totalling £119,000 between them. Special severance payments are those made outside contractual or statutory entitlement, and academy trusts need Education and Skills Funding Agency approval above set thresholds — they are routinely scrutinised, which is why they are separately disclosed.

Because the trust spans multiple regions, its posts sit across several regional pay bands. As on any trust, that regional variation will move your pay considerably more than any trust-level policy does — see our national pay scales guide for how the bands differ.

What the trust actually pays

We could not find a published Lift Schools teacher pay policy. We checked the trust's governance pages directly and no pay policy is listed. That means the only public evidence of the pay position is what appears in live vacancy adverts — which, fortunately, is fairly clear.

Both adverts point the same way: the trust advertises against the national structure rather than a bespoke one. A principal post named explicitly as "L15-L21" is particularly telling, because a trust that had abandoned the national framework would have no reason to use L-point numbering at all.

For orientation, this site's illustrative 2026/27 Outer London figures put M1 at £39,196 and U3 at £58,120 — the Aylward advert's £37,870 to £56,154 spans a comparable shape, drafted against an earlier pay year. Use our take-home pay calculator to convert any advertised figure to a monthly net position.

Executive pay is structured differently and the trust says so: senior executives are on individually negotiated "spot salaries" overseen by a Remuneration Committee, rather than on a published scale. That is a common arrangement in large trusts, and it is the arrangement that produced the executive pay scrutiny covered further down this page.

What's verified and what isn't

• Verified directly: the AET-to-Lift Schools name change, confirmed against the Companies House register for company number 06625091 with an effective date of 22 August 2024.
• Well evidenced: the CEO's public comments on directed time, reported on 24 September 2024 by both Schools Week and Tes, with direct quotation and with NASUWT's response in the same coverage.
• Well evidenced: the 2019 union dispute, reported by Tes and others, with named union officials quoted on the record.
• Documented on GOV.UK: the Financial Notice to Improve issued 24 October 2014 and lifted on 7 July 2017, and Ofsted's focused inspection of the trust conducted in November 2015 and published February 2016.
• Reported: the July 2026 DfE exercise naming Lift Schools among 78 trusts required to justify chief executive pay, and the CEO pay band rise to £280,000-£285,000 reported by Tes in January 2026.
• Disclosed in the accounts: staff numbers, staff costs, severance payments, the existence of a Joint Consultative and Negotiating Committee, and facility time figures.

• Not found: a published teacher pay policy. The trust's governance pages do not list one, so pay progression and UPR assessment arrangements are not readable from outside.
• Not found: the identity of the unions party to the trust's Joint Consultative and Negotiating Committee. The committee is confirmed in the accounts but no published document names its member unions.
• Not found: any published workload charter or workload reduction commitment — which is a conspicuous gap given the CEO's stated position on directed time.
• Not verified: the full cost of the rebrand. Schools Week reported £45,000 for the new branding specifically and reported that the trust would not disclose the total cost of the name change.
• Not settled: the number of schools, which ranges from 57 to 62 across four sources.
• Not characterised here: the outcomes of individual employment tribunal cases, which we have not read in detail and therefore do not summarise.

The "archaic" directed hours row

This is the most directly relevant thing on this page for anyone considering a teaching post at the trust, because it concerns the chief executive's stated position on the single hardest workload protection teachers have.

On 24 September 2024, Lift Schools chief executive Becks Boomer-Clark publicly described the STPCD's 1,265-hour annual directed time cap as "archaic", saying that "we can't continue to rigidly count hours if we want to be seen as a profession". The comments were reported by both Schools Week and Tes. NASUWT's Chris Wheeler pushed back against the view in the same coverage.

Both sides of this argument deserve stating properly, because it is a real debate and not a manufactured one.

Two things are worth being careful about. First, a chief executive expressing a view in a public debate is not the same as the trust having changed anyone's contract — there is no evidence in anything we found that Lift Schools has removed the directed time cap from its teachers' terms, and we are not suggesting it has. Second, the view was expressed publicly and on the record, which is more transparency than most trust leaders offer on the subject.

The 2019 dispute: seven unions and a no-confidence vote

In spring 2019, the trust — then AET — faced one of the more serious multi-union confrontations in the academy sector. Seven unions threatened coordinated strike action across roughly 60 AET schools, and this was followed by a formal vote of no confidence in trust leadership from UNISON, the NEU and ASCL.

Two of the quotations from that period go directly to pay and workload, which is why they belong on a pay page rather than being left to a general history. Mary Bousted, then joint general secretary of the NEU, said: "Teachers' pay progression is one of the lowest in the sector and staff workload is a severe problem." Jon Richards of UNISON said: "AET is demonstrating a total lack of respect for staff."

Bousted's comment is the substantive one for this page. It is a specific claim about pay progression — that is, how readily teachers moved up the scale and onto the upper pay range — rather than about headline salary. That distinction matters, because a trust can advertise entirely standard main and upper pay ranges while being restrictive about who actually progresses through them. Pay progression is exactly what a published pay policy would document, and exactly what we could not find published.

The necessary balance: this was seven years ago. The trust has since changed its chief executive, its strategy and its name, and there is no evidence we found of a live pay dispute or ballot at the trust today. It would be unfair to present a 2019 dispute as a description of the 2026 employer. But it would also be incomplete to leave it out, and a coordinated seven-union action across 60 schools is not a routine event — it indicates a relationship that had broken down comprehensively rather than a local disagreement.

Union recognition today

The trust's accounts confirm a Joint Consultative and Negotiating Committee (JCNC). That is a meaningful structure — the word "negotiating" in the title implies more than consultation — but there is a real gap in what is publicly knowable about it.

Facility time — the paid time given to union representatives for union duties — is disclosed for 2024-25 as 39 representatives totalling 31.6 full-time equivalent, at a cost of £9,658.45 against a total pay bill of £226.3m. That is roughly 0.0043 per cent of the pay bill.

Read alongside comparable disclosures, that is a reasonably substantial representative network by academy sector standards — 39 reps across a trust of this size means most schools are likely to have someone, which is what actually matters when you need representation in a meeting. The cash cost is negligible relative to the pay bill, which tells you the paid release attached to those roles is modest rather than that the network is absent.

The practical advice is simple. Because the JCNC's membership is not published, ask at school level: is there an active workplace rep here, which union, and when did the JCNC last consider something affecting this school?

Financial and regulatory history

Two formal interventions are on the public record under the AET name, both now resolved, and both worth stating precisely rather than vaguely.

The fair summary is that this trust had a serious regulatory period a decade ago which was formally resolved nearly ten years ago. It is history rather than a live concern. But it is the kind of history that is worth knowing when you are assessing how much weight to put on a trust's current self-description — and it is filed under a name the trust no longer uses.

Executive pay under scrutiny

This is the most recent item on the file, and unlike the 2014 and 2019 material it concerns the trust as it operates now.

In July 2026, the DfE named Lift Schools among 78 trusts required to justify chief executive pay. Separately, Tes reported on 29 January 2026 that the chief executive's pay had risen to a disclosed band of £280,000 to £285,000, up from £245,000 to £250,000 — an increase of at least 12 per cent.

Some care is needed here. Being named in a DfE pay-justification exercise is not a finding of wrongdoing; the department writes to trusts whose executive pay sits above thresholds relative to size, and many have entirely reasonable explanations. Seventy-eight trusts is a large group. And a large trust running upwards of 57 schools and employing nearly 4,700 people is a substantial organisation by any measure.

But the juxtaposition is the reason it is on this page. A rise of at least 12 per cent at chief executive level is considerably larger than recent annual awards on the teacher pay scale, and it sits in the same eighteen months as the same chief executive's public argument that the profession should stop counting hours. Whether you find that troubling or irrelevant is your judgement to make — but you should be making it with the figures in front of you rather than without them.

Tribunal history as a data point

Roughly 18 published employment tribunal decisions involving this trust appear on GOV.UK between 2017 and 2024, with a further case (Ms K Fleming v Lift Schools) in April 2026.

We are deliberately not characterising any individual case, because we have not read them in detail and it would be irresponsible to summarise outcomes we have not verified. What the raw count is useful for is scale calibration, and it should be handled carefully in both directions.

• Large employers generate tribunal claims. Roughly 4,690 staff over seven or eight years is a very large number of employment relationships, and 18 published decisions across that period is not on its face a remarkable rate.
• Published decisions are a subset. Only cases reaching a full hearing and judgment are published; claims settled or withdrawn before hearing never appear, so the register understates total claim volume at every employer equally.
• Comparison is what would make it meaningful, and there is no easy trust-by-trust benchmark available, so the number cannot be read as high or low without one.
• The register is public and searchable. If this matters to you, the decisions are on GOV.UK under both the Lift Schools and Academies Enterprise Trust names — search both, since older cases are filed under the former name.

Beyond salary: the rest of the package

Where a trust uses national pay structures, the non-pay offer is where the real differentiation lives — and Lift Schools' is genuinely stronger than most, particularly at leadership level.

• Employer-funded UK Healthcare cash plan from day one. This is the most distinctive item in the package. A healthcare cash plan reimburses everyday costs — dental, optical, physiotherapy and similar — and employer-funded from day one, with no qualifying period, is a genuinely uncommon term in the education sector.
• Pluxee childcare vouchers, which for staff with pre-school children can be worth a meaningful amount depending on scheme eligibility.
• Blue Light Card discount scheme — retail, travel and leisure discounts. Modest but real.
• A standing Wellbeing & Safeguarding Committee at board level. Having wellbeing as a named board committee rather than an item under someone else's agenda is a structural signal, though a committee is not an outcome.
• Teachers' Pension Scheme access, which you should confirm at offer stage as standard — a small number of trusts in the sector have offered alternative arrangements with reduced employer contributions, which is almost always a bad deal over a career.

The leadership development offer is quantified unusually specifically, and if you are aiming at headship it may be the most financially significant thing on this page. The Principal-level package is described as up to £100,000 in a personal development account over five years, plus a one-term professional sabbatical.

Treat that figure with the care any headline benefit deserves — it applies to Principal-level appointments rather than to classroom teachers, and "up to" is doing real work in the sentence. But a funded term away from the day job is a substantial and unusual term, and the scale of the development account is far larger than any above-scale salary uplift in the sector. If you are weighing a leadership move, ask exactly how the account may be spent, what approval it requires, and what the sabbatical's eligibility conditions are.

We found no published workload charter or workload reduction commitment, which is the gap most worth noting given the CEO's stated position on directed time. If you want the pension point above in more detail, our guide to the 2015 scheme explains why it is worth confirming in writing.

What changes under the 2026 Act

Under the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, academies will be required to have regard to the STPCD and to meet a statutory minimum pay floor set by reference to it, with the School Teachers' Review Body's remit extended to cover academies. The timing is widely misreported: Section 59 and Schedule 3 commenced on 29 June 2026, which gives the Secretary of State the power to make a minimum remuneration order. Academies are only actually required to pay the floor once that order is made, and the Department for Education has said that will be no earlier than September 2026; no order had been made at the time of writing. The September 2027 date frequently quoted alongside this Act belongs to a separate provision — QTS becoming a requirement in academies — not to the pay floor.

For a trust already advertising on MPR, UPR and L-point structures, the pay floor itself is unlikely to require much change. The interesting question here is the conditions side, and this is the one trust profile on this site where it is genuinely live.

The statutory duty is to have regard to the whole of the STPCD, not only its pay ranges — and the whole of the STPCD includes the 1,265-hour directed time framework that this trust's chief executive has publicly called archaic. A trust whose leader has argued in print that the profession should stop counting hours will, once the conditions limb of the duty is commenced, be under a statutory duty to have regard to the document that requires exactly that counting. That limb — paragraph 6 of Schedule 3 — was deliberately carved out of the June 2026 commencement and awaits its own regulations, which the DfE has said will come no sooner than September 2026. How the duty is interpreted in practice is not yet settled. If you are weighing a post here for the longer term, it is the thing to watch.

How to verify Lift Schools' current position yourself

Everything above is assembled from public sources and things change. Verify the position for the specific school and role, not the trust in the abstract.

None of these are awkward questions, and a well-run trust will answer all of them. Reluctance to produce a pay policy, or vagueness on directed time, is itself the answer.