What English schools and colleges advertised in autumn 2026: pay across 4,205 vacancies

Between 31 August and 2 November 2026, schools, academy trusts and further education colleges in England advertised 4,205 jobs through the Department for Education’s Teaching Vacancies service. We read every advert and recorded what each one offered to pay. This is the result.

Pay transparency in education is better than in most sectors, but it is not complete. Of the 4,205 adverts, 2,661 carried a usable salary figure. The remainder gave only a pay scale reference, a grade, a spine point or nothing at all, which tells a candidate very little until they look up a separate document. Where a figure was given we recorded the floor and ceiling of the advertised range, because that is what someone sees before deciding whether to apply.

The shape of school pay

The single most useful number here is not an average. It is the spread. Across 2,422 adverts quoting an annual figure, the median advertised floor was £27,274. A tenth of adverts opened below £16,149 and a tenth opened above £41,328.

That bottom decile deserves an explanation, because it looks alarming and is mostly not. A large share of support roles in schools are part time, term time only, and advertised at the actual pay rather than the full time equivalent. An advert offering £16,000 for a four day week in term time is not an advert for a £16,000 career. It is roughly £24,000 pro rata. The sector advertises this way far more than most, and it is one of the reasons school pay is widely misread from the outside.

What each kind of job paid

Grouping the adverts by the role named in the title produces the clearest picture of the hierarchy inside a single building.

Three things stand out. The first is the distance between the classroom and the leadership team: a median floor of £34,069 for a classroom teacher against £66,662 for senior leadership, with head of department sitting almost exactly on the classroom teacher floor but reaching £52,835 at the top of its range. Responsibility in schools is paid through the ceiling of a range rather than its floor.

The second is how tightly support roles cluster. Teaching assistants, site and catering staff all sit within a few hundred pounds of £24,796, which is the National Joint Council scale doing its work. These are not negotiated salaries, they are grades.

The third is that SEN and inclusion roles, at a median floor of £26,003, are advertised barely above general teaching assistant work despite demanding specialist training. 360 of the 4,205 adverts were SEN or inclusion posts, making it one of the largest single categories on the service.

Full time is not the default

Of the 4,205 vacancies, 2,617 were advertised as full time and 1,588 as part time. Two out of every five jobs advertised over these nine weeks were part time. For anyone picturing school employment as a full time career with long holidays, the adverts tell a different story: a very large part of the workforce is engaged by the hour or the term.

227 adverts priced the work hourly rather than annually. The median hourly rate was £13.51, with the middle of the market running from £12.71 to £17.50. Almost all of these were midday supervision, cleaning, catering and casual cover.

Geography is worth more than seniority at the bottom of the scale

London advertised a median salary floor of £34,359. The East of England, which carried 574 vacancies against London’s 421, advertised a median floor of £25,614. That is a gap of £8,745 on broadly comparable work, and it is larger than the gap between a teaching assistant and a pastoral lead.

Volume and pay do not move together. The South East advertised the most vacancies of any region at 597, at a median floor of £27,622. The North East advertised 153, the fewest of any English region, at £26,638. A candidate willing to move is choosing between a thin market that pays near the national median and a thick one that pays well below it.

Which subjects schools were short of

Where a secondary teaching advert named its subject in the title, the demand pattern was consistent with what the sector has reported for several years.

What it means if you are looking

Three practical readings come out of this. If you are a support staff candidate, the advertised figure is often the actual figure for part time, term time work, so check whether a number is pro rata before dismissing it, and check it against the NJC grade rather than the headline. If you are a teacher, the floor is close to fixed and the money is in the ceiling, which means responsibility points and leadership rather than moving school for a better starting salary. If you are willing to relocate, the regional gap is larger than almost any promotion available at the bottom of the scale.

For schools and trusts the reading is simpler. Just over a third of adverts gave no usable salary figure at all. Every one of those asks a candidate to do homework before applying, in a market where 1,588 part time vacancies were competing for attention in the same nine weeks.

Maths, science and English together accounted for 310 of the named subject vacancies, roughly a third of all classroom teacher adverts. Advertised floors barely move between subjects, which is expected: the main pay scale does not vary by subject, and schools compete for shortage subjects through recruitment and retention payments that rarely appear in the headline salary. Computing produced only eight adverts in the period, too few to report a reliable figure, which is itself worth noting given how often computing is described as a shortage subject.

Who was hiring

The largest single advertisers over the period were further education colleges and multi academy trusts rather than individual schools. Outwood Academy Ormesby posted 23 vacancies, East Coast College 18, and Plumpton College, Luminate Education Group, North Kent College, Yeovil College and Windsor Forest Colleges Group all posted between 13 and 15. This matters for anyone reading the figures as a picture of schools alone: the Teaching Vacancies service carries college vacancies too, and colleges recruit in larger blocks.

How we did this

Every vacancy published through the Teaching Vacancies service between 31 August and 2 November 2026 was collected via the service’s public API, which is open data published under the Open Government Licence. Each advert’s salary text was parsed into a numeric range and a pay period.

Salary text in this sector is messy, and the parsing rules matter more than the arithmetic. Where the text named a period, such as “per annum” or “per hour”, that period was used; the service’s own unit field was treated only as a fallback, because it reports almost everything as annual, including rates plainly written as hourly. Adverts were excluded from the salary figures where pay was stated only as a scale point, a grade or an allowance. A teaching and learning responsibility payment of £5,874 is not a salary, and a parser that reads it as one will report that a head of department earns £5,874 a year.

Of the 2,661 adverts carrying a usable figure, 2,422 were annual and 227 hourly. Only annual figures appear in the salary tables. Medians are used throughout rather than means, because a small number of principal and chief executive posts would otherwise pull every average upwards.

What this is, and what it is not

This is a record of what was advertised. It is not a pay survey, and it is not a record of what anyone was paid. Advertised ranges are opening positions, and the figure a candidate accepts after interview is frequently different and is never published.

The data covers schools, trusts and colleges that advertise through the Teaching Vacancies service, which is the Department for Education’s own platform and the largest single source of state education vacancies in England. It does not cover independent schools, which rarely use it, and it does not cover Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, which run separate systems.

Nine weeks is also a specific moment in the year. Late summer and early autumn are a recruitment peak, weighted towards posts starting in January and the following September. A reading taken in February would look different.

We will publish this again each month. The method will not change, so the figures will be comparable, and where they move we will say so rather than quietly restating them.

Related

• Teaching assistant salary guide
• Teaching interviews: what to expect in UK schools
• Browse live school and college vacancies

Source data: Teaching Vacancies, Department for Education. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Figures cover 4,205 vacancies published between 31 August and 2 November 2026.