Spencer Academies Trust Teacher Pay Explained (2026/27)

Most of the trust profiles on this site exist because there is a specific, documented pay claim to test — a flat allowance, a percentage uplift, a bespoke set of band names. Spencer Academies Trust is a useful contrast precisely because there is no such claim to test. It is a large, well-established East Midlands trust that says, in its own words, that it pays in line with the national framework rather than above it. That is not a criticism; it is simply a different kind of trust, and it deserves to be reported as accurately as the above-scale trusts that get more attention.

What follows is built from Spencer's own website — its About Us, Welcome, Vision & Values, Our Performance, Work With Us and Employee Benefits pages — from its Employee Benefits document dated October 2025, from a live vacancy on the DfE's Teaching Vacancies service, and from the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register. Where a figure is our own arithmetic rather than the trust's or the DfE's, we say so.

What Spencer Academies Trust actually is

Spencer Academies Trust is headquartered at Spencer Place, Regan Way, Beeston, Nottingham, and traces its origin to 2011, when George Spencer Foundation School and Technology College converted to academy status. It has since grown into a trust spanning what its own site describes as five areas: Nottingham City, Nottinghamshire, Derby City, Derbyshire and, more recently, Leicestershire.

On the exact size of the trust, its own pages are not perfectly consistent with each other, which is itself worth reporting rather than smoothing over. The trust's About Us page states a total of 26 academies, "18 of which are primary including 1 special school and 8 of which are secondary". Its Work With Us page and its CEO's welcome message both instead describe "18 primary academies, eight secondary academies and one primary-aged special school" — which totals 27, not 26. The Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register settles the question: it lists 27 academies under Spencer Academies Trust, and a phase-by-phase count of the individual schools listed there confirms 18 primary, 8 secondary and 1 special — exactly matching the trust's own Work With Us wording. We have used 27 throughout this page.

On pupil numbers the trust's pages agree: "over 18,000" children and young people aged 3 to 18 appears consistently across its About Us, Work With Us and Welcome pages. On staff numbers they do not: the CEO's welcome message — the most recently updated of the pages we found, referencing 2026 performance data — states "over 2,800 talented colleagues", while the separate Work With Us page states "more than 2,500". We report the higher, more recently dated figure as the current one, and flag the discrepancy rather than pick silently between them.

The trust describes its mission as being "to provide high quality education and deliver the best possible outcomes for children and young people", organised around three stated values — Aspiration, Partnership and Responsibility — under the banner "One Spencer". It also runs a School-Centred Initial Teacher Training provider, a DfE-designated Teaching School Hub, a research school and a maths hub, which matters for the CPD section later on this page: Spencer is unusually well set up, structurally, to run its own professional development rather than buying it in.

No bespoke scale: what "align with or exceed" means

Here is the central finding of this page, stated plainly because it is easy to miss among trusts that shout about their pay offer. Spencer Academies Trust's Employee Benefits document — dated October 2025 and published on its careers pages — describes pay under "Financial Benefits" in these words: "We offer competitive salaries based on role, experience, and market conditions. Terms align with or exceed the School Teacher's Pay and Conditions document, Burgundy Book, and NJC Green Book. We have introduced model staffing and grading structures to eliminate TUPE variations."

Read that carefully and it says something quite specific. "Align with or exceed" is a compliance statement, not a premium claim. It promises that no Spencer academy will pay below the STPCD, the Burgundy Book (teachers' conditions) or the NJC Green Book (support staff conditions) — which is a real and useful assurance, because academies are not legally bound to any of those documents and some trusts have historically paid below them on individual points. It does not promise, and does not claim, an uplift above them. That is the opposite structure from United Learning, which publishes a point-by-point scale specifically to demonstrate how far above national rates it pays, or Harris Federation, which prints a named allowance on every advert. Spencer makes no equivalent claim anywhere we could find, and the live vacancy evidence in the next section is consistent with that.

The other sentence worth noticing is the one about "model staffing and grading structures to eliminate TUPE variations". Trusts that grow by taking on struggling schools, or by schools converting in from different local authorities, often inherit a patchwork of legacy pay and grading arrangements under TUPE protection — meaning two support staff doing the same job at two different ex-maintained schools within the same trust can sit on different grades for years. Spencer's statement that it has standardised this is a genuine piece of housekeeping most trusts do not mention publicly, and it points toward consistency across the trust's 27 academies rather than the school-by-school variation that can otherwise creep in.

What a live vacancy actually shows

Claims in a benefits document are one thing; a real advertised salary is a better test. At the time of writing, a one-year temporary teacher post at Bispham Spencer Academy in Nottinghamshire was advertised on the DfE's Teaching Vacancies service headed simply "MPS", with a salary of £32,916 to £45,350 for the full pay range, no allowance and no trust-specific band name.

Set that against the national scale. The illustrative 2026/27 Main Pay Range used elsewhere on this site puts M1 (the standard ECT starting point) at £34,069 nationally and M6 (the top of the main range) at £46,940, following the School Teachers' Review Body's recommended 3.5% uplift from 1 September 2026. Reversing that 3.5% — our own arithmetic, not a published figure — gives an implied prior-year national M1 of approximately £32,917 and M6 of approximately £45,353. Those numbers match the Bispham advert's £32,916–£45,350 range to within a few pounds, which is well inside normal rounding. The same check on M3 gives an implied prior-year figure of approximately £37,101, against the £37,101 quoted for M1–M3 posts in other Spencer job adverts we reviewed — again, an almost exact match.

Two things follow from that table. First, the match is close enough to conclude with reasonable confidence that Spencer's advertised Main Pay Range is the standard national scale, with no visible trust markup at any of the three points checked. Second, the advert itself had evidently not yet been updated for the September 2026 award at the time we checked it — it is pricing the post at what appears to be the 2025/26 national rate, not the current 2026/27 one. That is a timing lag rather than a pay policy, and it is exactly the kind of thing you should confirm directly: ask whether the salary on any Spencer advert reflects the current year's STPCD award, because on this evidence the trust simply follows the national figure once it catches up.

Pay progression and the annual award

Spencer's Employee Benefits document states that "automatic pay progression is available for eligible employees, alongside annual cost-of-living adjustments, subject to government policy". That is a shorter and less detailed description than trusts that publish a full pay policy provide — there is no equivalent here to United Learning's Contribution Based Pay scheme, with its named objectives, moderation panels and appeal process, and we found no published document setting out Spencer's own progression criteria or timetable.

The phrase "subject to government policy" is doing real work in that sentence. It reads as a commitment to pass on the STRB's annual recommended award once the Government accepts it, rather than a commitment to negotiate or exceed it. Combined with the "align with or exceed" language on pay itself, the overall picture is a trust that has chosen to track the national framework closely rather than build an independent pay mechanism — arguably the least ambiguous position of any trust profiled on this site, in the sense that there is very little of its own for a prospective applicant to have to decode.

We could not find any reference to directed time, the 1,265-hour annual limit, or the 195-day working year framed in those specific terms in the material we reviewed. The Employee Benefits document does state that "Educational Support Professionals work a notional 37-hour week, while teachers work 32.5 hours" — 32.5 hours a week across a standard 39-week teaching year comes to roughly 1,268 hours, which sits close to, not meaningfully above, the national 1,265-hour directed-time limit. That is a reassuring number on its face, but it is our own arithmetic on a figure the trust states for a different purpose (describing the working week, not directed time specifically), so treat it as an indicator rather than a confirmed match to the statutory limit, and ask directly at interview how directed time is actually calculated and allocated at the specific academy.

Pension: TPS or LGPS, nothing unusual

On pension, Spencer's position is exactly what you would expect and there is nothing to flag. The Employee Benefits document states plainly: "Employees are enrolled in either the Teacher's Pension Scheme (TPS) or the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), offering employer contributions, life cover, lower tax, and survivor benefits." Teaching staff go into the TPS, support staff into the LGPS, which is the standard split across the maintained and academy sectors alike. Our guide to the 2015 scheme sets out what the TPS actually promises.

This matters more than it might first appear, given what has happened elsewhere in the sector. During 2025, United Learning developed and then abandoned, under union pressure, a proposal to let teachers opt out of the TPS for a higher headline salary. We found no equivalent proposal, past or present, anywhere in the public record for Spencer Academies Trust. The Employee Benefits document also references continuing occupational health support for ill-health retirement applications "under the LGPS and TPS when criteria are met", which is a small but genuine sign that the trust engages with the pension schemes as standing arrangements rather than treating them as a line item to negotiate away.

The real offer: CPD and the SALT network

If Spencer is not competing on cash, the fair question is what it is competing on instead — and the clearest answer in the public record is professional development. The trust has built more of its own infrastructure for this than most trusts of comparable size.

• Spencer Alliance for Leadership and Teaching (SALT) — the umbrella the trust uses for staff development across support staff, teachers and leaders, described in its Employee Benefits document as offering "a variety of career pathways for ongoing development" grounded in evidence-informed training.
• George Spencer Academy SCITT — a School-Centred Initial Teacher Training provider run by the trust itself, meaning initial teacher training and, potentially, your first teaching post can sit inside the same organisation.
• Spencer Teaching School Hub — one of the DfE’s designated regional Teaching School Hubs, giving the trust a formal role in delivering the Early Career Framework and National Professional Qualifications to other schools in the region, not only its own.
• Derby Research School and the East Midlands West Maths Hub — both hosted by the trust, putting it inside two separate DfE-funded evidence-and-subject infrastructure networks.
• Leadership qualifications — the Employee Benefits document names NPQML and NPQH specifically as leadership training routes available through the trust.
• Chartered College of Teaching partnership — giving all employees access to the College’s research-based online knowledge hubs, a genuine research-access benefit rather than a discount scheme.
• Spencer Apprenticeships — the trust’s own registered apprenticeship provision, covering Teaching, Teaching Assistant and Early Intervention Practitioner routes, plus access to further CPD funded through the apprenticeship levy.

Taken together, that is a genuinely wide structural offer, and it is one a trust can only build at scale — a single school could not plausibly run its own SCITT, Teaching School Hub, research school and maths hub simultaneously. Whether it suits you depends on what you want from an employer: it is an offer built around career-long professional infrastructure rather than an immediate salary premium, which is a legitimate trade but a different one from what Ark, Harris or United Learning are selling.

Wellbeing and the rest of the package

Spencer's Employee Benefits document is considerably more detailed than most trusts publish, running to several pages covering financial, wellbeing, workplace and family benefits. The headline items:

• Employee Assistance Programme with Health Assured — 24/7, 365-day confidential support including telephone and face-to-face counselling, online CBT, financial and legal guidance, and the Wisdom wellbeing app with a mood tracker and live chat support.
• Menopause support and access to mental health first aiders, named explicitly rather than folded into a generic wellbeing line.
• Disability Confident employer status and specific neurodiversity support for reasonable adjustments.
• Occupational sick pay on the Green Book (support staff) and Burgundy Book (teachers) terms, plus continuous service recognition for previous work in education — meaning time at another school counts toward sick pay, leave and redundancy entitlements.
• Family leave at occupational rates for maternity, adoption, shared parental and paternity leave. From September 2026 the trust adds two weeks of occupational paternity pay at full pay including SPP — a specific, dated enhancement rather than a vague promise.
• Free parking and cycle storage at all sites, with a genuinely distinctive local detail: for Nottingham city employees, the trust pays the Nottingham City Council workplace parking levy on staff’s behalf, which is a real, quantifiable saving unique to working at a Nottingham-based Spencer academy.
• Cyclescheme and a Home and Tech salary-sacrifice scheme, plus a free will-writing service and retailer discounts via Bright Exchange.
• Long service award of £100 at 25 years’ service — modest in cash terms, and worth naming as modest: this is far smaller than the tiered loyalty bonuses some trusts pay from year one.

On holidays, the document is candid that arrangements differ by role: Educational Support Professionals get "at least 25 holiday days annually, plus bank holidays, increasing with service length", while teaching staff take leave that "coincide[s] with academy closure periods" — in other words, standard school holidays, with no extra INSET-day commitment of the kind some above-scale trusts advertise.

A trust mid-transition at the top

One detail worth flagging plainly for anyone applying now: Spencer Academies Trust's own website currently names its Interim Chief Executive as Kate Green, whose welcome message describes a career built entirely inside the trust — joining as a teacher in 2003 and progressing through Principal, Executive Principal and Director of Primary Education before taking on the interim chief executive role. That is a genuine, specific, first-person account published on the trust's own site, not a secondhand report.

It sits alongside an inconsistency worth naming rather than ignoring: a number of job-pack documents attached to Spencer vacancies on Teaching Vacancies, some evidently from earlier in the recruitment cycle, still describe the chief executive as Paul West, previously reported in trust material as a National Leader of Education with a background at GEMS Education. We could not find a press release, Schools Week report or other independent account explaining the transition, its timing, or whether it is expected to become permanent. Both things can be true at once — the current position, per the trust's own most recent page, is Kate Green as interim chief executive, and older recruitment documents simply have not caught up.

How Spencer's results compare

Pay is only one reason to choose a school, and Spencer publishes a reasonably detailed self-reported performance page that is worth setting out here, with the standard caveat that a trust reporting its own results is not the same as an independent audit. On 2025 Key Stage 2 data, Spencer reports 78% of Year 6 pupils meeting the expected standard in reading against a provisional national figure of 75%, 75% in writing against 74% nationally, 78% in maths against 72%, and 68% achieving the combined reading, writing and maths standard against 62% nationally.

At secondary level, the trust's 2024 Progress 8 score was 0.12, against a national average of −0.03 — a genuinely positive gap, though the disadvantaged-pupils figure of −0.51 (against a national −0.57) shows the trust's own disadvantaged cohort still performing well below zero, in line with the well-documented national pattern rather than an outlier in either direction. On 2025 EBacc entries the trust reports 27% of pupils achieving grade 4 or above against a 2024 national figure of 25%, and 21% achieving grade 5 or above against 18% nationally. Post-16, the trust's 2024 average A-level point score was 36.07 against a national 35.69, with 27% of entries graded A*–A against 25% nationally.

None of this tells you what your own experience at a specific Spencer academy will be like — a trust running 27 schools across five local authority areas will contain real variation from one school to the next, and Ofsted judgements differ across the estate as they do at any trust of this size. But a consistent pattern of results modestly above the national average, across primary, secondary and post-16 phases, is a more favourable overall picture than several of the above-scale trusts profiled elsewhere on this site can point to, and it is self-reported in enough numerical detail that a candidate can sense-check individual claims against a specific school's published Ofsted report and performance tables.

What we couldn't verify

Being explicit about the gaps matters as much here as anywhere else on this site, particularly for a trust with a much lower public and media profile than the large above-scale trusts.

• Well evidenced: the trust’s size (27 academies, per the DfE register), pupil numbers (over 18,000) and the general shape of the Employee Benefits document, all sourced directly from the trust’s own current website and a live Teaching Vacancies advert.
• Well evidenced: the "align with or exceed the STPCD" pay commitment and the absence of any above-scale claim, quoted directly from the October 2025 Employee Benefits document.
• Well evidenced: standard TPS/LGPS pension provision, with no history of an alternative pension proposal found anywhere in the public record.
• Reasonably well evidenced, but our own arithmetic: that the live Bispham advert matches the prior-year national Main Pay Range almost exactly — checked against one live advert and two other quoted figures, not a full audit of every academy’s current adverts.

• Not found: any published teachers’ pay policy setting out progression criteria, a moderation process, or how TLR and Upper Pay Range points are handled.
• Not found: any Glassdoor or Indeed employee review profile for Spencer Academies Trust that we could locate — a genuine information gap rather than a finding either way about working culture.
• Not found: any reported industrial dispute, NEU or NASUWT campaign, strike ballot or redundancy consultation involving this trust in the material we reviewed.
• Not verified: the exact date or reason for the apparent change of chief executive from Paul West to Kate Green (interim), or whether the interim role is expected to become permanent.
• Not verified: whether the trust’s exact school count is 26 or 27 by the trust’s own reckoning — its own pages disagree with each other; we used the DfE’s independently compiled figure of 27.
• Not verified: whether Upper Pay Range, TLR and leadership posts follow the national figures with the same precision as the Main Pay Range advert we checked.

Spencer Academies Trust and the academy pay floor

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 gives the Secretary of State the power to set a statutory minimum pay floor for academies, referenced to the STPCD, and extends the School Teachers' Review Body's remit to cover academy trusts. Section 59 and Schedule 3 commenced on 29 June 2026, but that only creates the power to make a minimum remuneration order — academies are not actually bound until the Secretary of State makes one, which the Department for Education has said will happen no earlier than September 2026, with no order made at the time of writing. The frequently-quoted September 2027 date belongs to a separate provision — QTS becoming a requirement in academies — not to the pay floor itself. A government amendment during the bill's passage confirmed the floor is a floor, not a ceiling.

For most trusts profiled on this site, that legislation raises a genuine question: does an above-scale trust's own bespoke structure clear the coming floor, and does the floor threaten to unwind a genuine differential? For Spencer, on the evidence set out above, the question barely arises. A trust that already states its terms "align with or exceed" the STPCD is, by its own description, already doing what the floor will eventually require by law. The interesting open question — as at every academy trust, regardless of its pay position — is the conditions side of the STPCD rather than the pay side: the duty to "have regard to" the whole document extends to directed time and working patterns, and how firmly that duty will bite in practice is still to be settled through statutory guidance rather than the Act itself. See our full guide to the academy pay floor for the detail that applies across the whole sector.

How to check pay before you apply

Because Spencer publishes less about pay specifically — as distinct from wellbeing and benefits, where it publishes a great deal — than a trust like United Learning, the practical burden of checking falls more on the applicant here than it would at a trust with a published Annex C.

• Check the live advert for the specific post, not a general description of the trust. Our own check found Spencer adverts using standard MPS/UPS language with no allowance — confirm that is still true for the role you are applying for.
• Ask whether the salary quoted reflects the current year’s STPCD award. The advert we checked appeared to be priced at the prior year’s national rate rather than the post-September-2026 figure — a timing lag worth clearing up before you accept.
• Ask which specific pay point you are being offered — not just "MPS" or "UPS", since those bands each span a range of several thousand pounds.
• Confirm your pension in writing — Teachers’ Pension Scheme for teaching roles, Local Government Pension Scheme for support roles — as ordinary good practice with any employer.
• Ask what CPD you would personally receive in year one, and how much of the SALT, SCITT and Teaching School Hub provision is available to classroom teachers rather than staff already on a leadership track.
• Ask about directed time and the working week at the specific academy. The trust’s own figure of a 32.5-hour teaching week is consistent with, but not an explicit statement of, the national 1,265-hour limit — get the specific school’s position confirmed.
• Ask who currently leads the trust centrally and whether the chief executive position is expected to be filled permanently, given the apparent recent transition.
• Check the specific academy’s own Ofsted report and performance data, rather than relying on trust-wide averages — a 27-school trust will contain real variation from one school to the next.

Model what any offer is actually worth after deductions with our take-home pay calculator, and see the full national 2026/27 pay scales for the points Spencer's own adverts are evidently built around.