TKAT (Kemnal Academies Trust) Pay Explained

Most of the trusts profiled in this section of the site are interesting because they deviate from the national pay scale in one direction or another — United Learning with its own PT and EPT bands, Harris Federation with a flat allowance on top of national pay, Ark Schools with a flat percentage uplift. TKAT is a useful and honest counter-example. Every piece of evidence we could find — a union's published guidance, a union's own pay-award tracker, and four live vacancy adverts spanning teaching, technician and leadership posts across three different counties — points the same way: TKAT pays the national scale, in full, with no separate structure sitting alongside it.

That is not a reason to skip this page. Confirming that a trust follows STPCD and the Burgundy Book is itself useful information, because plenty of academy trusts say nothing at all about the point and leave you to find out by accident. What follows sets out the evidence for that conclusion, then pivots to the things that genuinely do vary at TKAT: what its live adverts show in cash terms, how it structures TLR and leadership pay, what its scale of operation across the South and East actually means for career moves within the trust, its own initial teacher training route, and the CPD and wellbeing offer it publishes on its careers site.

What The Kemnal Academies Trust actually is

The Kemnal Academies Trust describes itself as one of the largest multi-academy trusts in the South and East of England, running 45 special, primary, secondary and all-through academies under what it calls the "#oneTKATfamily". The Department for Education's own financial benchmarking data breaks that total down as 29 primary academies, 15 secondary academies and 2 special academies. The trust has been registered as a company limited by guarantee since August 2010, and its head office — the Atkins Centre at Kemnal Technology College — sits in Sidcup, on the Kent side of the London border.

Rather than a single national footprint, TKAT organises its schools into named geographic clusters — TKAT Coast, TKAT Central, TKAT City, TKAT East, TKAT Essex and TKAT Weald — which broadly track a spread across Kent, south-east London's outer boroughs, Essex and the Hampshire coast. Live vacancies we found in September 2026 bear that spread out concretely: Bridgemary School in Gosport, Hampshire; Miltoncross Academy in Portsmouth; Cleeve Park School in Sidcup, Kent; and King Harold Business & Enterprise Academy in Essex. That is a genuinely wide geographic reach for a single employer, and it matters for anyone thinking about a career inside the trust rather than just a single post — see the section on career mobility below.

STPCD and the Burgundy Book, confirmed

The core fact this page is built on comes from NASUWT's published guidance on The Kemnal Academies Trust, which states that in the recognition agreement between TKAT and the recognised trade unions, it has been established that TKAT will employ all teaching staff on national terms and conditions for school teachers — the STPCD and the Burgundy Book. Those are the two documents that, between them, govern pay progression, scale points, allowances and conditions of service such as directed time, sick pay and maternity provision for the maintained sector. A trust committing to both is committing to the whole package, not just the headline pay figures.

NASUWT's own stated position is that members working in academies, including TKAT academies, should receive "at least the equivalent pay award to teachers in other maintained schools" — and its published tracker of TKAT pay awards gives two concrete, dated examples of the trust doing exactly that. In January 2019, TKAT followed the STPCD recommendation and paid 3.5% on every point of the Main Pay Range, 3% on the Upper Pay Range, 3% on the Leadership Pay Range and 2% on allowances. In February 2020, it followed the School Teachers' Review Body's recommendation and paid the 2.75% cost-of-living uplift to all teachers on all pay scale points. Both are specific, dated, sourced from a union's own member-facing tracker rather than from the trust's own marketing, and both show the same pattern: the national award, passed on in full, at the time it was due.

What that confirmation does and doesn't tell you

We want to be precise about the strength of this evidence rather than overstate it. What we have is a union's account of a recognition agreement, corroborated by a union's own record of two specific historical pay awards, corroborated again by live 2026 vacancy adverts using standard national scale language. That is a genuinely consistent picture from three independent angles. What we do not have is a copy of the recognition agreement published by TKAT itself with the operative clause quoted in full — the kind of document Oasis Community Learning publishes for its own equivalent commitment. We looked for one on TKAT's own site and could not access it during this research.

That distinction matters less than it might sound, because the more recent and more specific evidence — live job adverts from schools currently recruiting — points in exactly the same direction as the older union document. When several independent sources of different types and different dates all describe the same arrangement, that convergence is itself meaningful evidence, even without a single definitive published contract to point to.

What live TKAT adverts actually show

Because TKAT does not publish a bespoke pay policy document of the kind some trusts do, the most reliable current evidence is what its own schools are advertising right now. Here is what we found live on the Department for Education's Teaching Vacancies service in September 2026, across four different TKAT academies in three different counties.

Read across that table and the pattern is unmistakable. Every single advert uses the vocabulary of the national system — MPS, UPS, TLR bands, L-points, or a recognisable local authority support staff spine — and every region-specific figure lines up with where the school actually is. Cleeve Park sits close to the Kent–London boundary and is paying Outer London leadership rates; King Harold sits in the London Fringe area of Essex and is explicitly quoting a Fringe allowance; Bridgemary and Miltoncross, both well outside the London pay area, are quoted on rest-of-England or local authority terms with no London weighting at all. That is exactly what you would expect from a trust genuinely applying the national document rather than a bespoke internal scale, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence on this page.

For context, the national Main Pay Range that Bridgemary's advert is drawing on runs from £34,069 at M1 to £46,940 at M6 for 2026/27, with the Upper Pay Range continuing to £52,835 at U3 — see our full 2026/27 pay scales guide for every point and region. A TKAT classroom teacher outside London should expect to sit somewhere on that same range, exactly as they would at a maintained school down the road.

TLR and leadership pay: no bespoke uplift found

We looked specifically for any sign that TKAT enhances Teaching and Learning Responsibility payments or leadership pay above the national ranges, in the way a small number of trusts do. We did not find one. The Bridgemary advert specifies a standard TLR2, which nationally runs from £3,651 to £8,913 — the same range that applies in every English region, including London, since TLR bands are not regionally weighted. The Cleeve Park leadership post sits within the single national Leadership Pay Range, which for 2026/27 runs from £53,586 to £148,829 before regional weighting is applied — the advert's own "L8–L15, Outer London" wording confirms the standard STPCD leadership spine and regional banding rather than any TKAT-specific override.

• Standard TLR letters and numbers (TLR2, in the one example we could verify in full) rather than a trust-branded allowance name.
• Standard L-point leadership range (L8–L15 at Cleeve Park) rather than a bespoke leadership band.
• Correct regional weighting applied in every case we checked — Outer London at a Kent school near the London border, Fringe in Essex, no London weighting in Hampshire and Portsmouth.
• No evidence anywhere in the material we reviewed of a trust-wide percentage uplift, a flat cash allowance on top of the scale, or a separate TKAT pay point naming system.

None of this is a criticism. A trust that applies the national TLR and leadership structure faithfully is doing exactly what its recognition agreement says it will do. The practical takeaway for an applicant is that a TLR or leadership post at TKAT should be evaluated on the same terms you would use for any maintained school post: what specific band and point are you being offered, and does the level of responsibility genuinely match it.

The scale of TKAT and what it means for your career

If TKAT does not compete on pay, its genuine competitive advantage for a teacher is scale. Forty-five academies spanning primary, secondary, special and all-through provision, organised into six named clusters across four counties, is a large enough network to function almost like an internal jobs market. That has some real, practical consequences worth setting out plainly.

• Phase mobility. A trust running primary, secondary, special and all-through academies side by side can support a move between phases — for example a secondary teacher moving into an all-through setting, or a mainstream teacher moving into one of the trust's two special academies — in a way a single-phase employer cannot.
• Geographic mobility without changing employer. Moving between Gosport, Portsmouth, Sidcup and Essex normally means four different job applications, four different induction processes and four different pension continuity questions. Inside one trust, relocating between clusters can in principle be a transfer rather than a fresh start — though whether that is offered in practice is a fair question to ask HR directly rather than assume.
• A shared professional network. The trust's own Learning and Development Network and subject-level events, such as its trust-wide science leaders' conference, give teachers a peer group beyond their own staffroom — genuinely useful in a smaller academy where you might otherwise be the only specialist in your subject.
• Leadership pipeline across a large group of schools. With 15 secondary and 29 primary academies to draw on, a trust of this size has more internal leadership vacancies to promote into over a career than a standalone school or a small federation would.

TKAT's own SCITT: training your own teachers

One genuinely distinctive and well-documented feature of TKAT is that it runs its own School Centred Initial Teacher Training provider. The trust's careers site lists "Initial Teacher Training (SCITT)" as a dedicated vacancy category, on equal footing with teaching, leadership and support staff roles, rather than treating initial teacher training as something outsourced entirely to a university or an external provider.

For a prospective trainee, that has a concrete practical implication: a TKAT SCITT place puts you inside the trust's own network of academies from day one of training, with a plausible route into a TKAT newly qualified teacher post at the end of it rather than having to compete for a job cold once your training year ends. TKAT's own news pages mark this transition explicitly — the trust runs an end-of-year graduation event for its newly qualified teachers each summer, which is a small but genuine signal that the trust treats the ECT stage as a distinct, celebrated milestone rather than a purely administrative one.

We would treat "grow your own" teacher training as a real, structural advantage for anyone already leaning towards a South East England posting, rather than a reason on its own to choose TKAT over a university-led PGCE route — the right choice between SCITT and PGCE routes depends on far more than which multi-academy trust runs the provider, and our guide to becoming a teacher sets out the wider routes into the profession in more detail.

Pension: the Teachers' Pension Scheme

Qualified teachers in TKAT academies are entitled to the Teachers' Pension Scheme, exactly as they would be in a maintained school. This is not a discretionary benefit that a trust could plausibly withdraw or substitute — access to the TPS for teachers in state-funded schools, including academies, is a matter of statutory entitlement, not a policy choice each trust makes independently.

We looked for any sign of an alternative arrangement of the kind United Learning proposed and then abandoned in 2025 — a defined-contribution scheme offered as an alternative to the TPS in exchange for a higher headline salary — and found nothing suggesting TKAT has ever considered one. That is exactly consistent with a trust that has committed to standard STPCD and Burgundy Book terms: those national arrangements assume standard TPS membership, and nothing in TKAT's recognition agreement, careers material or live adverts points to any deviation. If pension security matters to you as much as salary, TKAT's conventional position is a point in its favour rather than against it. Our guide to the 2015 scheme sets out what that guarantee is actually worth.

CPD, wellbeing and the rest of the package

TKAT's careers site publishes a specific, named benefits list rather than a vague statement of intent, and individual job adverts repeat several of the same items, which gives us reasonable confidence they are applied consistently rather than existing only on a marketing page.

• Learning and Development Network (LDN). A trust-wide CPD structure the trust's own site describes as providing "CPD, career development and vast promotion opportunities" — corroborated by individual adverts, which separately promise coaching and mentoring from a school's own leadership team plus a structured induction programme.
• The DAS Employee Assistance Programme. Free, confidential advice and support, referenced both on the trust's central benefits page and directly inside individual job adverts.
• Free Specsavers eye tests. A specific, named provider rather than a generic "eyecare voucher" promise.
• TKAT Widerwallet discount programme. A staff discount scheme, in the same broad category as similar schemes at other large trusts.
• Cycle to work scheme. Standard salary-sacrifice cycle purchase, again repeated in individual adverts as well as the central benefits page.
• A named Wellbeing offer, listed as its own category on the trust's careers site alongside the items above.

Set against a trust that pays a flat cash allowance or an above-scale percentage, this is a more modest package in pure pound terms — none of these benefits substitute for extra salary, and none of them were quantified in the sources we could access. What they do show is a trust investing in retention through professional development and everyday wellbeing support rather than headline pay, which is a coherent and defensible strategy for a large, geographically spread trust competing mainly on stability and career structure rather than on a recruitment premium.

What we could and couldn't verify

As with every trust profiled on this site, here is the evidential status of the claims above, stated plainly rather than presented with uniform confidence.

• Well evidenced: TKAT's commitment to national STPCD and Burgundy Book terms, from NASUWT's published guidance on the trust.
• Well evidenced: TKAT's historical pay award pass-through in January 2019 and February 2020, from NASUWT's own member-facing tracker.
• Well evidenced: the academy count and phase breakdown (45 academies: 29 primary, 15 secondary, 2 special), from TKAT's own site and DfE financial benchmarking data.
• Well evidenced: the four live vacancy adverts, their schools, locations and advertised pay, checked directly on the DfE's Teaching Vacancies service in September 2026.
• Well evidenced: the benefits list (Learning and Development Network, DAS Employee Assistance Programme, free Specsavers eye tests, Widerwallet discounts, cycle to work, Wellbeing), from TKAT's own careers site, and partly repeated inside individual job adverts.
• Well evidenced: that TKAT runs its own SCITT initial teacher training provider, from its own careers site vacancy categories.

• Not found: a recognition agreement or standalone teachers' pay policy published directly by TKAT itself, with the operative clause quotable in full. We relied on NASUWT's published account of it instead.
• Not found: a current, trust-wide pupil headcount we could trace to a primary source we could access during this research.
• Not found: any independent employee review-site rating (such as Glassdoor or Indeed) that we could reliably access and verify for TKAT specifically, so none is quoted on this page.
• Not verified: whether internal transfers between TKAT academies or clusters are actively facilitated in practice, as opposed to being merely possible in principle given the trust's size.
• Not verified: the exact cash value of the TLR at Bridgemary School beyond the TLR2 band, or the exact leadership point within the L8–L15 range at Cleeve Park — both adverts named the band rather than the individual point.

TKAT and the academy pay floor

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 requires academies to have regard to the STPCD and will, once a minimum remuneration order is actually made, set a statutory pay floor by reference to it. Section 59 and Schedule 3 of the Act commenced on 29 June 2026, giving the Secretary of State the power to make that order, but the Department for Education has said the floor itself will apply no earlier than September 2026, and no order had been made at the time of writing. For most of the trusts on this site, that legislation is the central development to watch, because it constrains how far above or below the national scale a trust's own bespoke pay structure can sit.

For TKAT, the practical effect of the pay floor is close to zero. A trust that already applies the national STPCD in full, by its own recognition agreement and by the evidence of its live adverts, clears any floor set by reference to the same document more or less by definition. The more interesting question for TKAT, as for every other trust, is what "having regard to" the STPCD's conditions provisions — directed time, working patterns, the Burgundy Book's sickness and leave terms — ends up meaning in the statutory guidance that is still to come. Since TKAT's recognition agreement already commits it to the Burgundy Book on conditions as well as pay, it is, if anything, better placed than most trusts for that provision to bite without requiring any change in practice.

How to check before you apply

Everything above is built from public sources during September 2026. TKAT publishes less of its own employment material than some trusts profiled on this site, so verifying your own specific offer matters more here than it would somewhere with a fully published pay policy.

• Ask for your specific pay point in writing — not just "MPS/UPS", which on its own covers a spread of more than £18,766 a year nationally, before any regional weighting is applied.
• If a TLR or leadership point is offered, ask for the exact band and point, not just the letter. "TLR2" alone still spans £5,262, and "L8–L15" spans several thousand pounds more.
• Confirm which regional weighting applies — national, Fringe, or Outer London — for the specific academy, and check it against the current national figures on our 2026/27 pay scales guide.
• Ask to see the recognition agreement or pay policy directly, since we could not find one published by TKAT itself. A trust genuinely following STPCD and the Burgundy Book should have no difficulty producing the document that says so.
• Confirm your pension arrangement is the standard Teachers' Pension Scheme in writing, as a matter of course, even though we found no evidence to suggest otherwise at TKAT.
• Ask about internal mobility directly if the trust's geographic spread across Kent, Essex, south-east London and Hampshire is part of the appeal — whether transfers between academies or clusters are actively supported, or would mean reapplying as an external candidate.
• Ask whether there is a recognised union rep at the specific academy, and speak to them before accepting. TKAT's recognition agreement with NASUWT and other unions is the mechanism that has, on the evidence available, kept it aligned with national pay awards — but how active that presence is will vary school by school.
• Model the actual take-home figure once you have a specific point confirmed, using our take-home pay calculator, and use our TLR calculator if a responsibility payment is part of the offer.