REAch2 Academy Trust Teacher Pay Explained

Most trust pay pages on the internet exist to answer the question "do they pay more?" REAch2 is a useful case precisely because the answer is a clear, well-evidenced no — and yet the trust still turns out to have more public, verifiable, teacher-relevant information attached to it than almost any other trust of its size. The salary is the least interesting thing about it. The governance around the salary is the interesting part, and it is the part almost nobody checks before applying.

This page follows the same rule as the rest of this section: everything is sourced, everything uncertain is labelled uncertain, and where we looked for something and could not find it, we say that rather than filling the gap with a plausible guess.

What REAch2 actually is

REAch2 Academy Trust is England's largest primary-only multi-academy trust. It runs a network of primary schools spread widely across England rather than clustered in one region, which means its posts span several different regional pay bands — National, London Fringe, Outer London and Inner London all appear in its adverts.

Pinning down exactly how many schools it runs is harder than it should be, and the variation is worth reporting honestly rather than resolving arbitrarily. The trust's own signed accounts say 62 primaries. Its own website says 60. The government's Get Information About Schools database lists 65. None of those is wrong, exactly — trusts open, close and transfer schools continuously, and each source is a snapshot from a different date with slightly different inclusion rules. But it is a useful reminder that even the most basic fact about a trust does not have one authoritative number.

Around 21,321 pupils are educated across the network, plus roughly 1,302 children of nursery age, with an average staff headcount in the region of 3,048. The trust is led by Chief Executive Cathie Paine, whose pay is disclosed in the £220,000 to £230,000 band. It has also spun off schools into separate trusts more than once in its history: both Astrea Academy Trust and Reach South Academy Trust originated as REAch2 spin-offs.

The primary-only focus matters for anyone comparing this trust with the secondary-heavy names that dominate academy coverage. Primary teaching posts carry fewer TLR-bearing roles than secondary departments do, which means the route to earning above the main and upper pay ranges looks different — leadership, rather than head of department. If you want the underlying structure, our guide to the national pay scales sets out how M1 to M6, the Upper Pay Range and TLR payments fit together.

The headline: standard national scale

The Tes "MAT Tracker" investigation published on 7 June 2024 asked trusts across England whether they used their academy freedoms to depart from national pay scales. A REAch2 spokesperson gave an unusually clear answer: the trust has "no plans to move away" from the national pay scales, which "provide a helpful structure...with flexibility built-in".

That single quotation is worth more than a dozen careers-page benefit lists, because it is a named trust responding on the record to a direct question from a journalist. It also tells you something about how REAch2 thinks: it is not treating pay freedom as an opportunity it has failed to exploit, it is treating the national framework as the sensible default and the flexibility inside it — TLRs, recruitment and retention allowances, pay progression decisions — as sufficient.

Context from the same investigation makes clear how normal that is. Of the twenty largest trusts that responded to Tes, only three exceeded the national scales. The overwhelming majority of the sector, including almost all of its biggest names, mirror STPCD by choice.

What the job adverts actually say

The single most reliable source on any trust's current pay is a live vacancy advert, because it has to state a real number for a real post starting soon. REAch2 vacancies are aggregated on its own recruitment portal, and two examples show the pattern clearly.

Two things stand out. First, those are recognisable national STPCD main pay range figures for the pay year the adverts were drafted against — not a bespoke REAch2 scale. The pound-and-pence precision (£32,916.00, not "around £33,000") is itself a tell: it is a scale point lifted straight out of the national document. Second, the Purfleet figures sit consistently above the Henhurst Ridge ones by roughly the London Fringe differential, exactly as the national structure would predict.

For orientation, this site's illustrative 2026/27 national figures put M1 at £34,069 and M6 at £46,940, with Fringe equivalents of £35,602 and £48,479. The advert figures above are lower because they were drafted against an earlier pay year — which is exactly why you should always compare an advert against the scale for the year the post actually starts, not against whatever figures you last memorised. Our take-home pay calculator will convert any of these to a monthly net figure after tax, National Insurance and pension.

What's verified and what isn't

Because trust pay information is unreliable as a category, it is worth being explicit about the evidential status of each claim here rather than presenting it all with equal confidence.

• Well evidenced: that REAch2 pays the national teacher pay scale. Stated on the record by a trust spokesperson to Tes in June 2024, and corroborated by live vacancy adverts quoting standard STPCD main range points.
• Well evidenced: the seven-union National Recognition Agreement, the termly National Joint Consultative Council, and the disclosed facility time figures — all stated in the trust's own signed accounts for the year to 31 August 2025.
• Well evidenced: the CEO pay cap of ten times an M1 teacher's salary, disclosed in those same accounts.
• Well evidenced: that support staff sit on trust-specific pay scales rather than a national one, visible directly in REAch2 vacancy adverts.
• Well evidenced: the 2024 Wellbeing Pulse Survey results, because they are the trust's own first-party disclosure rather than a review-site aggregate.

• Not found: a published teacher pay policy. We checked the trust's policies library directly and no pay policy and no appraisal or pay progression policy is listed there.
• Not found: any trust-level directed time statement, 1,265-hour calculation, longer-day policy or non-standard term dates. The public record on REAch2 working hours is blank beyond the standard 32.5 hours a week that adverts quote.
• Not found: the National Recognition Agreement itself. It is referenced in the accounts but not published as a standalone document, so its actual terms — what is negotiated versus merely consulted on — cannot be read.
• Not found: any published workload charter or workload reduction commitment.
• Not settled: the number of schools in the trust, which varies between 60, 62 and 65 depending on the source and date.

The centrepiece: seven recognised unions and a real negotiating body

If there is one thing that genuinely distinguishes REAch2 as an employer, this is it — and it is the sort of thing that never appears in a "best trusts to work for" listicle because it is dull to describe and impossible to reduce to a star rating.

The trust's signed accounts for the year to 31 August 2025 record a National Recognition Agreement with seven recognised trade unions: the NEU, NASUWT, NAHT, ASCL, UNISON, GMB and UNITE. That covers every major teaching union, both major leadership unions, and all three major general unions representing support staff. It is supported by a National Joint Consultative Council (NJCC) that meets termly.

• NEU and NASUWT — the two largest classroom teacher unions, so whichever you are in, your union has standing at trust level.
• NAHT and ASCL — the leadership unions, which matters if you are a deputy or aspiring head within the trust.
• UNISON, GMB and UNITE — covering teaching assistants, administrative staff, site teams and central office, who in a primary trust are a very large share of the workforce.

Why does this matter to a classroom teacher whose salary is fixed by the national scale anyway? Because recognition machinery is what determines everything the pay scale does not cover: restructures, redundancy processes, changes to working patterns, appraisal policy, the terms of any new trust-wide policy that lands on your desk. A trust with a standing termly forum where seven unions sit opposite senior leaders has a route for those conversations that does not depend on individual goodwill. A trust without one does not.

The counterweight — and there is one — is the facility time disclosure.

Facility time is the paid time employers give union representatives to carry out union duties. REAch2 disclosed four officials totalling 3.69 full-time equivalent, at a total cost of £3,167.03 in the year, against a total pay bill of £116.7m. That is roughly 0.003 per cent of the pay bill.

Read that number carefully rather than in either direction's favour. It is genuinely tiny — 3.69 FTE of representatives is not a large machine for a trust employing around 3,048 people across 60-odd schools, and a three-thousand-pound annual cost line tells you the paid release involved is minimal. But it is also disclosed, which is the point: the figure exists in a public document, in pounds and pence, and can be checked. Most trusts publish nothing comparable, so no reader can make this judgement about them at all.

The CEO pay cap tied to M1

Executive pay in the academy sector is a long-running controversy, and the usual pattern is that a Remuneration Committee benchmarks the chief executive against other trusts of similar size — a process with no formal relationship to what anyone teaching in the trust earns.

REAch2 does something different, and discloses it in its own accounts: the CEO salary "will not exceed 10 times the salary of the lowest paid, qualified teacher on M1 pay scale".

This is a small thing with a large implication. It converts executive pay from an absolute figure into a ratio, anchored at the bottom of the qualified teacher scale. If M1 rises, the ceiling rises with it. If M1 is frozen, the ceiling is frozen too. A classroom teacher's pay point is written into the trust's own constraint on its highest salary.

In practice, Cathie Paine's disclosed pay of £220,000 to £230,000 sits comfortably inside the cap — ten times an M1 salary is a substantially larger number than that, so the cap is not currently biting. It is a ceiling rather than a target, and it would be wrong to present it as a constraint that is actively holding executive pay down today. But it is a published, specific, checkable commitment expressed in teacher-scale terms, and that is rare enough to be worth knowing about — particularly given that the DfE has in recent years required dozens of trusts to justify chief executive pay levels.

Support staff are on trust-specific scales

Here is a distinction that matters enormously in a primary trust and is almost always missed: REAch2 pays teachers on the national scale, but support staff are on REAch2's own pay scales.

You can see this directly in the trust's vacancy adverts, which use phrases like "REAch2 payscale SCP 8 to 13" for school-based support roles and "REAch2 Central Support Pay Scale, SCP 34 - SCP 40" for central posts. The SCP (spinal column point) numbering is borrowed from the familiar national local government pay spine, but the scale itself is the trust's own — which means the cash value attached to any given SCP number is a REAch2 decision, not a nationally negotiated one.

Three practical consequences follow, and they are worth spelling out because in a primary school, teaching assistants, HLTAs, office managers and site staff make up a very large share of the workforce:

• An SCP number is not portable. "SCP 12" at REAch2 does not necessarily mean the same salary as SCP 12 at your local authority or at another trust. If you are moving between employers as support staff, compare the cash figure, never the point number.
• Annual uplifts are not automatic. National local government pay awards flow automatically to councils and to schools that follow NJC terms. A trust running its own scale decides separately each year whether and how to apply an equivalent uplift.
• This is where the union recognition earns its keep. UNISON, GMB and UNITE all being party to the national recognition agreement matters far more for a trust-scale support workforce than it does for teachers whose scale is set nationally anyway.

For an HLTA weighing up a REAch2 post against a maintained-school equivalent, this is the single most important thing on this page — more important than anything about teacher pay. Ask for the actual annual cash figure at the offered point, and ask what happened to that scale at the last two annual reviews.

Directed time: what we could not find

On most trust profiles, the conditions section is where the interesting tension lives — a trust that pays above scale usually buys that with longer contracted hours. For REAch2, we went looking for the equivalent and found nothing at all, which is itself a finding worth reporting precisely.

• No trust-wide directed time statement of any kind.
• No published 1,265-hour calculation or directed time budget.
• No evidence of a mandated longer school day across the network.
• No trust-level variation to standard school term dates.

What the adverts do show is unremarkable: standard 32.5 hours a week for teaching posts, 35 hours for support staff. That is the ordinary shape of a primary school contract, not an extended one.

The honest interpretation is that REAch2 appears not to have made directed time a trust-level policy question at all, which is consistent with a trust that has chosen to stay inside the national framework rather than build its own. Because it stays inside that framework, the STPCD's 1,265-hour cap across 195 days is the relevant reference point — and that is a meaningful difference from the trusts that sit outside STPCD entirely and therefore carry no such cap.

The trust's own wellbeing data

Every trust profile eventually runs into the same problem: there is no good public data on what it is actually like to work somewhere. Glassdoor aggregates are self-selected, skew toward strong feelings in either direction, and average dozens of very different schools into one meaningless number.

REAch2 is unusual in having something better — its own staff survey, with the results disclosed in its accounts.

A 2024 Wellbeing Pulse Survey achieved a 53 per cent staff response rate. Of those responding, 73 per cent felt leaders take workload into account when implementing policies, and 56 per cent rated their overall wellbeing as good or very good — a ten percentage point increase on the previous year.

Two readings of this are both fair. The generous one: a trust that runs a wellbeing survey, achieves a response rate over half, publishes the results in a document anyone can read, and shows year-on-year improvement is doing something most trusts do not do at all. The sceptical one: these are the employer's own figures, published by the employer, with the questions set by the employer — and 56 per cent rating their wellbeing as good means 44 per cent did not. A ten-point rise is only impressive against a low base.

Both readings are correct, and they are still better evidence than a star rating. First-party data with a stated methodology and a stated response rate can at least be interrogated; an anonymous review aggregate cannot. If you are at interview, the genuinely useful follow-up is to ask what the trust changed as a result of the survey — the answer to that tells you far more than the percentages do.

Beyond salary: the rest of the package

Where a trust pays the national scale, the non-pay package is where any actual differentiation lives. REAch2 publishes its offer, and several items carry genuine cash value.

• Real Living Wage accredited employer. This is a formal accreditation, independently administered, committing the employer to pay at least the Real Living Wage — which is set above the statutory National Living Wage. In a primary trust with a large support workforce, this is a substantive commitment rather than a badge.
• Employee Assistance Programme with six free counselling sessions. Note the specific number: many EAPs advertise "access to counselling" without quantifying it. Six sessions is a stated, checkable entitlement.
• Blue Light Card discount scheme — retail, travel and leisure discounts. Modest in value but genuinely used.
• Support staff annual leave of 28 days plus 8 bank holidays, rising to 31 days. This matters only to support staff, since teachers' leave follows school closure periods — but for a term-time-plus or all-year support post it is a real term worth comparing against a local authority equivalent.
• Teachers' Pension Scheme access, as you would expect from a trust that mirrors national terms. Confirm at offer stage regardless — a small number of trusts elsewhere in the sector have offered alternative pension arrangements with reduced employer contributions, which is almost always a bad deal over a career.

We found no published workload charter or workload reduction commitment, which is the most conspicuous gap in the offer given how central workload is to primary teacher retention. Our guide to the 2015 pension scheme explains why the pension point above is worth confirming in writing rather than assuming.

Funding centralisation and the 2023 restructure

The one piece of genuinely critical independent reporting on REAch2 concerns money and structure rather than teacher pay, and it belongs on this page because it tells you something about how the trust operates.

Schools Week reported on 8 March 2023 that REAch2 had moved to GAG pooling — the practice of centralising schools' general annual grant funding at trust level and redistributing it, rather than each school holding its own budget. At the same time, the trust undertook a central-office restructure that placed roughly 57 of 216 head-office roles at risk. UNISON's Mike Short was quoted criticising the cuts, saying that "office staff are essential and cutbacks are unacceptable".

GAG pooling is contentious in the sector for a specific reason: it moves budget control away from individual headteachers and toward the centre. Supporters argue it lets a trust support struggling schools with the resources of stronger ones and buy services more cheaply at scale. Critics argue it reduces a head's ability to respond to their own school's needs — including staffing decisions. For a teacher, the practical consequence is that decisions affecting your school's staffing capacity may be taken at trust level rather than by your head.

Two things should be said in balance. First, the restructure concerned central office roles, not classroom teaching posts. Second, we found no evidence of teacher strike action, no live pay dispute, and no ballot specific to REAch2 in any source — which, for a trust of over 3,000 staff, is a genuinely positive data point and not merely an absence. Serious teacher pay disputes at trusts this size normally get reported.

REAch2 versus the above-scale trusts

It is tempting to frame a national-scale trust as simply losing to an above-scale one. The comparison is more interesting than that, because the above-scale trusts generally buy their uplift with conditions.

Neither column is the right answer for everyone. If you want the maximum gross salary and are content to trade hours for it, an above-scale trust is a rational choice, and our Ark Schools profile sets out that trade in detail. If you want the national framework's protections intact and value collective machinery over a sub-£1,000 gross uplift, a national-scale trust like REAch2 is not a compromise — it is a different, defensible preference.

And remember the scale of what is actually at stake. A 2.5 per cent uplift on a main range salary is worth roughly £850 a year gross, which after tax, National Insurance and pension is perhaps £45 to £55 a month. A single TLR payment, a move up the scale, or a change of regional pay band all move your pay considerably more than the trust-versus-trust question does. The academy trust pay overview covers that wider picture.

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 like REAch2 the honest answer is: probably very little changes. A trust already applying the national scale by choice is already compliant with a floor set by reference to that scale, and already operating inside the framework the legislation is pulling the rest of the sector toward. If anything, the reform narrows the gap between REAch2 and the trusts that currently differentiate, by removing the downside risk of academy employment for everyone else.

The more interesting effect is on the comparison above. If the legislation requires trusts to have regard to the whole of the STPCD rather than only its pay ranges — and the whole of the STPCD includes directed time provisions — then the conditions advantage that national-framework trusts currently hold may narrow too. How that interacts with trusts running longer contracted days is not yet settled, and is the thing to watch.

How to verify REAch2's current position yourself

Everything above is a snapshot assembled from public sources. Before you accept any post, verify the position for the specific school and role rather than the trust in the abstract.

None of these are difficult or presumptuous questions, and a well-run trust will answer all of them without hesitation. Reluctance to produce a pay policy or to answer the directed time question is itself informative.