Oasis Community Learning Teacher Pay Explained

Most academy trust pay pages have to begin by admitting that nobody outside the trust can tell you what it pays. Oasis is the rare exception in the opposite direction from the usual one. It is not that Oasis pays more than the national scale — as far as we can establish for classroom teachers, it pays exactly the national scale. It is that Oasis has written down, in a document it publishes itself, that it will not move away from national terms without agreement. Across this whole research project that is the single best-documented explicit commitment to national pay we have found.

That makes Oasis interesting for a reason that is almost the mirror image of why Ark Schools is interesting. Ark is worth profiling because it uses academy pay freedom and says so. Oasis is worth profiling because it has formally constrained its own use of that freedom, and because doing so in writing is so unusual. This page sets out what the commitment actually says, what it covers, where the trust does differ from national practice, and the live developments that anyone considering a post there in 2026 needs to know about.

What Oasis Community Learning actually is

Oasis Community Learning is the schools arm of Oasis, a Christian charitable movement that also runs community hubs, housing and youth work. It is one of the larger multi-academy trusts in England and one of the more geographically spread, operating across the Midlands, the South, London, the North West and elsewhere.

On scale, there are two numbers in circulation and we are going to give you both rather than pretending there is one. The trust's own accounts for the year ending August 2025 report 55 academies, broken down as 33 primary, 19 secondary and three all-through. The government's own schools database lists 58. Discrepancies like this are normal — they usually reflect the timing of school openings, transfers in or out of the trust and closures rather than anyone getting it wrong — but if you see a confident single figure quoted elsewhere, that is a rounding of a genuinely moving target.

The trust reported income of £303.6 million and states that 90 per cent of its academies are rated good or better by Ofsted. Teacher headcount, though, has been falling: full-time equivalent teacher numbers dropped from 1,726 to 1,623 over the relevant reporting period. We cannot tell you why from public sources, and there are several innocent explanations — falling rolls, restructuring, schools joining or leaving — but a decline of roughly a hundred teaching FTE is a real number worth noticing rather than glossing over.

As with any large network, the geographic spread matters more for your actual salary than the trust does. An Oasis post in Outer London and an Oasis post in the West Midlands sit on different regional bands of the national scale, and that gap is far wider than anything trust policy contributes.

The contractual commitment to national pay

Oasis publishes its Trade Union Recognition Agreement, and the principles section at the top of it contains the clause that makes this trust unusual. It reads, in the trust's own words:

"Oasis will employ staff on the national terms and conditions for school teachers and support staff (the STPCD and Burgundy Book agreement and the NJC Green Book agreement) and will not move away from these arrangements without agreement."

Three things are worth pulling out of that sentence. First, it covers terms and conditions, not just pay — so it is not only about the salary scale but about the whole STPCD framework, including directed time. Second, it covers support staff as well as teachers, by reference to the NJC Green Book, and sickness and leave terms by reference to the Burgundy Book. Third, the commitment is framed as a restraint requiring agreement, which is the part that gives it teeth: the counterparty whose agreement is required is the recognised unions, through the joint machinery the rest of the document establishes.

The clause goes on to deal with schools joining the trust from local authority control, committing Oasis to upholding local arrangements absorbed through TUPE transfers, while noting that over time local provisions will need to be aligned with national agreements for parity and transparency. If you are transferring into Oasis with a school rather than applying to one, that sentence is the one that applies to you, and it is worth reading as carefully as the headline.

What that clause does and doesn't lock in

We are not going to quote the strong half of that paragraph and stop, because the rest of it materially qualifies it. Immediately after the TUPE sentences, the same clause continues:

"If, in the opinion of Oasis, it becomes necessary to negotiate any variation away from national provision, this machinery will provide the mechanism to discuss this. The national arrangements will not themselves form the subject of discussion by this machinery."

So the agreement explicitly contemplates the possibility of a variation away from national provision. What it does is channel that possibility through a defined negotiating route rather than leaving it to a unilateral management decision. The final sentence is doing something slightly different again: it ring-fences the national agreements themselves — the STPCD, the Burgundy Book, the Green Book — as not being up for renegotiation inside the trust's own machinery. Oasis's joint committees can discuss a local variation; they cannot sit as a substitute national pay body.

There is one further limit worth knowing. The agreement is terminable, on an agenda item at a quorate meeting of the national joint committee, or on six months' notice of termination given by either Oasis or by the unions. Recognition agreements almost always work like this, and there is no suggestion anyone is contemplating it — but "contractual commitment" should not be heard as "irrevocable".

What the adverts actually show

Published policies describe intentions; live vacancy adverts have to state real numbers for real posts starting soon, which makes them the single most reliable public source on trust pay. Oasis adverts corroborate the recognition agreement rather than complicating it.

A primary teacher post at Oasis Academy Wattville on the Department for Education's Teaching Vacancies service stated the salary simply as "Salary MPS 1-6" — the main pay scale, with no trust uplift, allowance or qualification attached. A post at Oasis Academy Pinewood quoted £36,413 to £48,532, which corresponds to M1 to M6 on the Outer London band. Neither advert references an Oasis-specific scale, an enhancement or a supplementary allowance of the kind that above-scale trusts such as Harris Federation advertise prominently, because such trusts treat an uplift as a recruitment selling point and say so.

The honest reading of that is straightforward. If you are a classroom teacher, joining Oasis will not change your salary relative to a maintained school in the same region, and it will not change it relative to the great majority of other academy trusts either. What the recognition agreement buys you is not more money; it is a documented floor and a documented process. Whether that is worth more to you than a one per cent uplift somewhere else is a genuine judgement call, and it depends heavily on how long you expect to stay.

Leadership pay is the one real exception

There is one place where Oasis genuinely operates its own framework rather than simply applying the national one, and it is worth knowing about if you are on or heading towards a leadership track. The trust's annual report for 2025 describes the arrangement: "the pay of academy Principals and Vice Principals is based on the size of their academy and is consistent throughout OCL", set on "a seven-point range for Principals". The report also states plainly that "there are no bonus arrangements for senior leaders".

Read carefully, that is describing a trust-standardised approach rather than an above-scale one. Under STPCD, headteacher pay ranges are determined by school group size anyway, and a seven-point individual school range is the standard structure. What Oasis has done is centralise the determination so that two academies of the same size produce the same principal range, rather than each governing body setting its own. For a leader, that cuts both ways: it removes the scope to negotiate an outlier salary, and it removes the risk of being paid less than a peer running an identical school elsewhere in the network. The absence of bonus arrangements is also a real, stated fact rather than an omission, and it is in line with sector norms for schools.

We could not find a standalone Oasis teachers' pay policy document published separately from the recognition agreement. That is a genuine gap: most trusts of this size do publish one, and it is the document that would normally set out threshold arrangements, TLR structures, appeals routes and the annual review timetable. At Oasis, the recognition agreement is doing the heavy lifting instead, and if you want the detail you will need to ask for the pay policy directly at offer stage.

Hours and directed time: the longer-day theory doesn't hold

Because several well-known trusts pair national or above-national pay with a longer contracted day, we went looking specifically for evidence that Oasis does the same. We did not find any, and we think that is worth stating as a finding rather than leaving as an absence.

• No trust-wide longer-day policy was found. Oasis does not publish a statement of contracted hours above the STPCD position, and nothing in the recognition agreement varies directed time.
• No published directed time variation. The recognition agreement commits the trust to STPCD terms and conditions, which include the 1,265-hour directed time limit across 195 days.
• Academy calendars show the standard pattern. Individual academy term-date pages — Oasis Academy Sholing's, for example — show five INSET days and a school year of roughly 195 days, exactly as a maintained school would.

So the hypothesis that Oasis runs a longer day in exchange for something else simply does not survive contact with the evidence. On the available public material, Oasis does not appear to deviate from standard hours at all. That is a genuinely positive finding for a teacher comparing academy options, and it is the natural consequence of the recognition agreement: a trust that has committed to national terms and conditions has by the same stroke committed to the directed time framework that comes with them.

The usual caveat still applies at school level. Individual academies within any trust run extended-day provision, enrichment programmes, revision sessions and duty rotas, and how those are scheduled inside the directed time budget varies enormously between schools. The right question at interview is not "does the trust run a longer day" — the answer to that appears to be no — but "can I see the directed time calendar for this academy", which is a request any well-run school should meet without hesitation.

Union recognition and facility time

Oasis's recognition agreement is the fullest we have found published by any English trust, and it is worth describing in some detail because the machinery it establishes is what gives the national pay commitment its force.

The document names nine recognised unions: ATL, ASCL, GMB, NAHT, NASUWT, NUT, UNISON, Unite and Voice. It splits them by category, recognising ATL, ASCL, NAHT, NASUWT, NUT and Voice for teaching staff, and GMB, UNISON and Unite for support and other professional school staff. The version line at the foot of every page reads "V5 - 10.02.2009".

The machinery itself is full collective bargaining rather than consultation dressed up as bargaining. There is a National Joint Committee operating trust-wide, plus Academy-level Joint Committees handling local matters, with a defined relationship between the two: matters within the national framework are reserved to the national body, while academy committees handle the exercise of local discretion, and local decision-making can be referred upwards where necessary. Where the parties fail to agree, either side may refer the matter to ACAS for conciliation or arbitration. And the agreement contains a status quo ante provision — while the procedures are being followed, Oasis will honour existing terms, meaning a disputed change cannot simply be imposed while the dispute runs. The National Joint Consultative Council now meets monthly.

The numbers behind that machinery are the part that impressed us most. For 2024-25, Oasis disclosed 92 union officials, 86.2 of them full-time equivalent, at a facility time cost of £42,408 — 0.11 per cent of the total pay bill. That is the highest facility time ratio of any trust we have researched for this section, and facility time is about as close to a hard, audited measure of union access as the sector produces. It is money the trust actually spent releasing staff to do union work, reported under a statutory disclosure regime, rather than a statement of intent.

What that translates to practically is that there are likely to be active reps in the academy you are applying to, with released time to act. If you ever need representation — in a disciplinary or capability process, over a pay decision, or over workload — that matters considerably more than an extra half a per cent on the scale.

Beyond salary: the rest of the package

If classroom pay is national scale, the package is where the trust-level differences actually live. Oasis publishes a reasonably detailed benefits picture in its annual report, and several items are worth flagging.

• Pensions. Teachers are in the Teachers' Pension Scheme on standard terms, which follows from the STPCD commitment. Support staff are in the Local Government Pension Scheme at the standard 1/49 accrual rate — a genuinely good defined benefit arrangement that is easy to undervalue when comparing a support role against a private sector alternative.
• Life cover at three times pensionable pay, on top of the death-in-service benefits that come with the pension schemes themselves.
• A Health Shield cash plan covering routine costs such as dental and optical treatment — and, unusually, extending cover to children up to age 21, which is a materially more generous family provision than most employer cash plans offer.
• Support staff annual leave of 26 days plus eight bank holidays, rising to 31 days after two years' service. Term-time-only staff will see this pro-rated, but the underlying entitlement is above the statutory minimum.
• Paid days off for moving house or getting married — small in cash terms, but the kind of provision that tells you something about how an employer thinks about its staff.
• Stonewall Diversity Champion status, an external accreditation on LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion.

The most genuinely distinctive benefit we found is a partnership with the MTPT Project — the Maternity Teacher Paternity Teacher Project — which provides four free coaching sessions to any member of staff returning from maternity or paternity leave. Return from parental leave is one of the sharpest attrition points in teaching, and a structured, external coaching offer at exactly that moment is an unusually well-targeted intervention. If you are planning around parental leave, read this alongside our guide to teacher maternity pay and pension, which covers the statutory and Burgundy Book entitlements the coaching sits on top of.

We did not find a published workload charter. A number of trusts now publish one — a set of commitments on marking, data collection, meeting load and email expectations — and its absence at a trust of this size is a reasonable thing to ask about rather than a black mark in itself.

The Big Education merger, completing September 2026

This is the most immediately relevant thing on the page for anyone deciding about an Oasis post right now, so we have given it its own section rather than burying it.

A merger between Oasis Community Learning and Big Education has been approved and is completing in September 2026. Chief executive John Barneby has said publicly that he cannot rule out redundancies as a result. We want to be careful about how that is characterised in both directions. It is not an announcement of job losses, and a chief executive declining to rule something out during a major structural change is the responsible answer rather than a signal. Equally, it is not nothing, and it would be a disservice to pretend otherwise on a page aimed at people making employment decisions.

In practice, merger-driven redundancy in the school sector usually falls on central and back-office functions where two organisations duplicate the same role, rather than on classroom teaching posts, which are driven by pupil numbers rather than by trust structure. The teacher FTE decline noted earlier — from 1,726 to 1,623 — sits in the background of this, though we have no evidence linking the two and would not want to imply one.

One thing the merger does not appear to threaten is the pay position itself. The national terms commitment lives in the recognition agreement, and the status quo ante provision means existing terms continue while any dispute about a change is resolved. But confirming in writing that the commitment survives the merger is exactly the sort of thing worth asking at offer stage.

What it's like to work at Oasis

Evidence on culture at any large trust is weak, and we would rather be short and honest than pad this section out. Deliberately, there is no review-site rating quoted on this page: we attempted to check Glassdoor for Oasis during research and the page returned an access error, so we cannot confirm any figure and will not repeat one we have not seen.

What we do have is better than review-site data anyway, because it comes from the trust. Oasis runs a termly Employee Opinion Survey, and its own published material states that "the initial top priorities for action from the EOS include wellbeing and work life balance, leadership/line management". That is a first-party admission, published by the employer, that wellbeing and workload are among the things staff most want fixed. We are reporting it as a positive on transparency and a caution on substance: a trust that surveys its staff termly, publishes what came back and names the problems is doing something many do not, and the thing it names is the thing teachers most commonly leave over.

Oasis also commissioned an ImpactEd analysis of teacher retention in July 2025. The full findings have not been published, so we cannot tell you what it concluded and will not speculate. Its existence tells you the trust treats retention as a live problem it is spending money to understand.

On industrial relations, there is one significant recent episode. In November and December 2023, NEU members at Oasis Academy Isle of Sheppey took six days of strike action. The dispute was primarily about behaviour and safety policy — reporting described pupil assaults on staff and the academy's approach to exclusions — rather than pay, though coverage noted that there were also disputes over workload and a promised bonus payment. That is one academy out of 55 and should not be read as a trust-wide picture, but it is the sort of thing worth knowing, and it also demonstrates that the union presence in the trust is real and willing to act.

Separately, Oasis has twice been on government lists relating to executive pay scrutiny: it appeared on the Education and Skills Funding Agency's 2018 list of 87 trusts asked to justify chief executive pay, and again on the Department for Education's November 2024 list of trusts questioned over CEO pay. Being on those lists is not a finding of wrongdoing — the letters ask trusts to explain their rationale, and many large trusts have received them — but appearing twice, six years apart, is a pattern rather than a one-off.

One technical note if you go digging in the accounts yourself: there are two different ways the trust's "higher paid staff" figures are reported, giving 113 on one measure and approximately 48 on a narrower one. They are counting different things, over different thresholds, and quoting one as though it were the other will give a badly misleading picture of the trust's pay distribution.

What's verified and what isn't

As on every page in this section, here is the evidential status of the claims above, stated explicitly rather than presented with uniform confidence.

• Well evidenced: the national terms commitment, quoted directly from the trust's own published Trade Union Recognition Agreement, including the qualifying sentences about negotiating a variation.
• Well evidenced: the recognition machinery — nine named unions in the 2009 document, a National Joint Committee plus Academy Joint Committees, ACAS escalation on failure to agree, and a status quo ante provision.
• Well evidenced: the facility time disclosure of 92 officials / 86.2 FTE at £42,408, or 0.11% of the pay bill, for 2024-25.
• Well evidenced: that classroom adverts quote plain national scale ranges, corroborated by live Teaching Vacancies postings at Oasis Academy Wattville and Oasis Academy Pinewood.
• Well evidenced: the leadership pay framework and the absence of senior leader bonuses, quoted from the trust's own 2025 annual report.
• Well evidenced: the Big Education merger approval and completion date, and the chief executive's statement that redundancies cannot be ruled out.

• Not found: a standalone Oasis teachers' pay policy document, separate from the recognition agreement. That is where threshold, TLR and appeal detail would normally sit, and we could not locate one published.
• Not found: any trust-level directed hours or longer-day policy. We looked specifically and found nothing, and academy term dates show the standard pattern — but an absence of evidence is weaker than a published statement either way.
• Not found: a published workload charter.
• Not verified: any employee review-site rating. The Glassdoor page returned an access error during research and we will not quote a figure we could not confirm.
• Not verified: the current recognised union list as a definitive roster. The published agreement names nine unions but dates from 2009; the accounts reference eight. We have reported both rather than reconciling them for you.
• Not explained: the fall in teacher FTE from 1,726 to 1,623. The number is real and disclosed; the reason is not public.

How to check the position before you apply

Everything above is a snapshot from public sources in September 2026, at a trust that is in the middle of a merger. Verify the position yourself before accepting anything, and verify it for the specific academy and post rather than the trust in the abstract.

None of these questions are awkward or presumptuous, and a trust that has voluntarily published a recognition agreement committing itself to national terms should be more comfortable answering them than most.