What English schools and colleges are advertising in November 2026: pay across 4,989 vacancies

Schools, academy trusts and further education colleges in England were advertising 4,989 jobs through the Department for Education’s Teaching Vacancies service on 4 November 2026. We read every advert and recorded what each one offered to pay. This is the second edition of a monthly count, and the method has not changed, so the figures sit alongside October’s.

Pay transparency in education is better than in most sectors, but it is not complete. Of the 4,989 adverts, 3,604 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 3,232 adverts quoting an annual figure, the median advertised floor was £26,847. A tenth of adverts opened below £12,411 and a tenth opened above £38,995.

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 £12,411 for a four day week in term time is not an advert for a £12,411 career. It is closer to £18,616 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 pays

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 £65,712 for senior leadership. Responsibility in schools is paid through the ceiling of a range rather than its floor, and the classroom teacher ceiling of £48,479 carries that point.

The second is how tightly support roles cluster. Teaching assistants at £23,857, site, catering and cleaning staff at £22,803 and SEN and inclusion roles at £25,614 all sit within about £2,811 of each other, because almost all of them are priced against the same National Joint Council scale rather than against each other.

The third is that head of department and phase roles are not shown this month. Only 31 of them carried an annual figure, below the threshold of 40 this report uses, so there is no reliable median to print. Last month there were 44 and the floor sat at £34,069.

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

London stands £7,041 above the North East, which is more than most support staff can earn by promotion. Outside London the eight remaining regions sit inside £1,660 of each other, so for anyone not moving to or from the capital, region is close to irrelevant to the advertised floor.

Subject makes almost no difference

Shortage subjects are much discussed and barely visible in the adverts. 7 subjects clear the threshold this month, and the gap between the highest and lowest median floor among them is £1,153. The main pay scale minimum does the work, and where schools pay more for a hard to fill subject they do it through recruitment and retention payments that the advert prices separately, or not at all.

Full time is not the default

Of the 4,989 vacancies, 2,494 were advertised as full time only and 2,006 as part time only, with a further 489 open to either. Counting every advert that will take a part time candidate, 2,495 of 4,989 will, which is almost exactly half. 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.

349 adverts priced the work hourly rather than annually. The median hourly rate was £13.45, with the middle of the market running from £12.77 to £15.02. Almost all of these were midday supervision, cleaning, catering and casual cover.

What has moved since October

The first edition of this count was published on 2 November. One month on, the summary is that teacher pay has not moved at all, support staff pay has softened slightly at the median, and the advertised market has grown by about a fifth.

The classroom teacher floor is identical in both months, at £34,069, which is the main pay scale minimum and will not move until the scale does. The ceiling fell by £2,569, which reflects which schools happened to be advertising rather than any change to the scale.

The teaching assistant floor is £939 lower than last month. That looks like a pay cut and is better read as a change of mix. The number of teaching assistant adverts rose from 589 to 718, and the number carrying an annual figure from 381 to 541. More of those adverts are part time and term time only, priced at the actual sum rather than the full time equivalent, which pulls the median down without anybody being paid less per hour.

The same effect shows in the bottom of the distribution, where the tenth percentile fell from £16,149 to £12,411. Part time adverts rose as a share of the market, and part time adverts are the ones quoted at actual pay. Across the whole set the median moved by £427, which in a vacancy snapshot of this size is noise rather than a trend. Treat this month as broadly unchanged on pay and somewhat larger on volume.

What it means if you are looking

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 National Joint Council grade rather than the headline. Half the adverts in this month’s count will take a part time candidate, which is a much wider door than most sectors offer.

If you are a teacher, the floor is close to fixed and the money is in the ceiling. A median floor of £34,069 against a median ceiling of £48,479 means responsibility points and leadership move your pay, and moving school for a better starting salary mostly does not.

If you are willing to relocate, the £7,041 between London and the North East is larger than almost any promotion available at the bottom of the scale, though it buys a good deal less once housing is taken into account.

Who was hiring

No single employer dominates. The ten organisations advertising most accounted for 158 of 4,989 vacancies between them, and further education colleges are prominent among them.

How we did this

Every vacancy live on the Teaching Vacancies service on 4 November 2026 was collected through the service’s public API, which is open data published under the Open Government Licence. The service returns currently advertised vacancies rather than a historical window, so these are figures advertised as at that date. The October edition originally described a date range; both editions in fact read the same live list, and that article was corrected on 4 November 2026 to state its collection date, as this one does. No figure in it changed. 4,989 adverts met the length threshold used to exclude stub listings.

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 3,604 adverts carrying a usable figure, 3,232 were annual, 349 hourly and 23 priced by the day, week or month. Only annual figures are used in the medians and the percentiles. All central figures are medians rather than means, because a handful of executive headship salaries would otherwise drag every average upwards. Advertised pay is not actual pay: it is what an employer put in front of a candidate, before any negotiation, and for part time roles it is frequently the actual sum rather than the full time equivalent.

What this is and is not

This is a count of what was advertised, on one service, on one day. It covers state funded schools, academy trusts and further education colleges in England that recruit through Teaching Vacancies. It does not cover independent schools, and it does not cover Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, which run separate pay arrangements. It is not a survey of what staff are paid, and it is not a measure of vacancies filled. Where a cut of the data was too thin to be reliable, the figure is left out rather than printed with a caveat.

The method will not change between editions. Where the figures move we will say so, as we have above, 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.