Analysis: is the “extra pay” in some academy contracts really such a good deal for teachers?

Teachers at one of England’s largest academy chains are being paid nearly 20 per cent less per contracted hour than they would be if it followed national pay and conditions arrangements, calculations by this website indicate.

Ark Schools requires its teachers to work 8am to 5pm daily. This adds up to nearly 300 hours per year more than the national School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD), which applies in non-academy schools, stipulates.

This means that, even though Ark pays its teachers 2.5 per cent more than professionals of equivalent experience working in non-academy schools, at the academy chain they are having to work 23 per cent more, in terms of their contracted hours.

A teacher in the first year of their career at Ark, then, would be paid up to £20.80 per contracted hour, compared to their equivalent in the non-academy sector, who would receive £25.02 per hour: a difference of 17 per cent. The situation is the same further up the pay spine.

The findings come as England’s largest academy chain, the United Learning Trust, also appears to be paying its teachers less per contracted hour. And, a third, the Harris Federation, though paying its teachers up to £2,000 more than they would get if they were on national pay and conditions, has a working year of 30 hours more in terms of directed time, and conditions overall which are such that the National Education Union in Brent, north London, is advising members to stay with national contracts where they can.

Multi-academy trusts have gained much media coverage and a concession from ministers following warnings that moves, in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill currently going through Parliament, would limit their ability to pay teachers more. But there has been no coverage of the other side of the deal for teachers in these three chains: the more demanding “conditions” aspects of pay and conditions in these trusts.

The detail

Ark Schools, which controls 39 academies from its base in White City, west London, is the clearest case of the quid-quo-pro on offer at these three chains in terms of working conditions vs some extra cash.

The chain says that it pays 2.5 per cent extra to its teachers, compared to the rates within the STPCD. For a teacher at the start of the main pay scale (outside of London), this would mean a difference of £791 a year between the £31,650 they would earn as a teacher on “M1” on the national contract, versus the £32,441 their equivalent within Ark would be paid.

Similarly, a teacher on the national arrangements outside of London at the top of the main scale, on M6, would earn £43,607, compared to £44,697 within Ark, or £1,091 more.

However, Ark’s stipulation that teachers can be required to work at school from 8am to 5pm every day adds up to considerably more contracted time over the course of the year.

For comparison, the STPCD states that a teacher has to be available for work for 1,265 hours over the course of the year.

Specifically, it states: “A teacher employed full-time must be available to perform such duties at such times and such places as may be specified by the headteacher…for 1,265 hours, those hours to be allocated reasonably throughout those days in the school year on which the teacher is required to be available for work.”

Making the comparison between the STPCD and Ark Schools

The STPCD does not count any time a teacher spends on their lunch break as part of this 1,265 hours of directed time.

So, while Ark’s contract can require teachers to be on site for 8 am to 5pm, a fair comparison with the STPCD’s stipulation needs to subtract a daily lunchbreak from its total annual hourly figure.

Assuming the Ark lunchbreak is one hour long, which sources say may be a generous assumption for the chain, 8am to 5am equates to an eight-hour day of directed time. Over the 195-day working year, as set out in the Ark contract, this adds up to 1,560 hours annually.

This is 23 per cent more, in terms of annual directed or contracted time, for teachers working at Ark, in return for the 2.5 per cent extra pay.

It follows that, with the extra pay not keeping pace with the extra directed hours at Ark, the chain is paying teachers less per directed hour than would be the case if they were on a national contract, working for a local authority school or at an academy chain which follows national pay and conditions.

The M1 teacher on a national contract, paid £31,650 a year and working the 1,265 hours of directed time, is receiving £25.02 per contracted hour.

At Ark, a teacher of equivalent experience, paid the £32,441 a year and working 1,560 hours annually of directed time, allowing for a one-hour lunchbreak every day, would be on only £20.80 per directed hour. That is a difference of £4.22, or 17 per cent less.

Similarly, a teacher on M6, paid the £43,607, would earn £34.47 for each of their 1,265 directed hours, compared to the £28.65 per hour paid to their equivalent within Ark, working 1,560 hours with a one-hour lunchbreak for their £44,697. This is a difference of £5.82 and, again, a 17 per cent reduction per hour for the Ark teacher, compared to their counterpart on the STPCD.

If the calculations were based on teachers at Ark having only a half-hour lunchbreak – which union sources suggest may be more realistic given current working patterns - but still working the contracted 8am to 5pm, the trust’s contracted pay rates work out at 22 per cent less per hour, again at both the lower and upper ends of the main pay scale.

Advocates of academy chains’ ability to vary national pay and conditions might argue that the “directed time” provisions in both the STPCD and within Ark’s contract miss the point: in fact all teachers, outside and inside the academies sector, work well beyond the 1,265 hours annually. Thus, would be the argument, it is misleading even to try to compare the two: the major issue is the extra pay at Ark, with teachers in both sectors working beyond the limits of their directed time, for example on marking and preparation.

Some headteachers within Ark are also understood not to insist on teachers being on site from 8am to 5pm, with an early finish on Friday widely observed, so that the contractual demands are not always the reality of what teachers experience.

Indeed, this was the first line of Ark’s response to my enquiry on this (see full response at the end of this piece). Asked about the differential contracted hour pay rates, it said: “Teachers on the main and upper pay scales on an ARK contract are expected to be available between 8am-5pm – they are given approximately a 2.5% uplift on their salary at each point on the pay scale above the STPCD rates to recognise this.  In practice, principals can agree flexibility within these hours if necessary, so it doesn’t mean that all teachers must be at school between 8am and 5pm every day.”

The counter-argument, however, is that the contract sets out what teachers can be directed to do. Although it is possible that this directive is not followed, it is in the gift of the trust and its individual headteachers, rather than a right of the teacher. This seems a classic case of an employer having greater powers to set out the working conditions of an employee than would be the case under the national arrangements.

Also, a National Education Union source said that, in practice, Ark teachers often are asked to stay on site for extra after-school meetings, and intervention sessions with students. The reality, then, is that the contractual demands can add to workloads, and that the comparison with the 1,265 hours in the STPCD is meaningful.

United Learning Trust

At the Peterborough-based United Learning Trust, easily England’s biggest academy chain with 90 schools, the comparison is more complex. But there are some similarities with the ARK case.

According to the NEU, the trust states that “an average working week” is 37.5 hours, “20 per cent of which will be safeguarded for non-directed activity, including 10 per cent of teaching time allocated to PPA [planning, preparation and assessment]”.

This would equate to a working day of 7.5 hours, which would mean directed time of 8am to 4.30pm allowing for a one-hour lunch break, or 8am to 4pm with a half-hour lunchbreak.

By contrast, the 1,265 hours equates to a teacher working 8am to 3.30pm daily including a one-hour lunchbreak, or 8am to 3pm with that half-hour for lunch. So it is an hour less, per day, comparing the 1,265 hours to ULT’s 37.5 hour working week.

To put it another way, ULT’s 37.5 hour working week equates to 1,462.5 hours over the year, which is 16 per cent more than the STPCD’s 1,265 hours.

The NEU says that United Learning states that it pays an average of five per cent more at each STPCD pay point. Again, this looks on the face of it not to be favourable, in terms of the pay and directed hours at the trust, compared to the national contract. In other words, it is 16 per cent more directed time, for five per cent more pay.

A ULT document sets out the pay differential in more detail. Outside of London, classroom teachers at the ULT are this year are actually being paid between three per cent and 10.6 per cent more, compared to what they would earn via the STPCD pay points.

The pay differential is starkest at the lower end of the pay scale, with ULT’s equivalent of M1 paying 10.6 per cent more than the STPCD equivalent, but with differentials then steadily declining, to an advantage for ULT teachers of only 3.2 per cent for those at the top of the main scale, and then between 3.0 and 3.9 per cent for those on the upper pay scale.

Again, when set against the 16 per cent more directed time hours at ULT versus the national contract, at first glance this does not appear be a great deal for the former’s teachers, in terms of pay-per-directed hour.

An NEU source, however, cautions against making such a direct comparison. In reality, they said, some of the 37.5 hours required at ULT will include PPA outside of timetable, “where in many UL schools teachers could go home and do their planning and marking”. So this would not feel like directed time, in reality, for these teachers.

The source added: “The only difference is that a UL school could conceivably require staff to stay in school after hours to do that planning and marking, for up to 37.5 hours per week. In such cases, the NEU would consider all of this time to be ‘directed’ because the teacher is required to be on school premises. In these instances, yes, you can argue that the UL teachers receive a lower hourly rate than their counterparts. However, this isn’t the norm in UL schools. Although it happens in some places, UL claim that it’s unusual and by agreement with staff.”

So, although the 37.5 hours does equate to a longer directed time, in practice it may be difficult to put a precise comparative figure on it.

The NEU therefore feels that other aspects of differences between teachers on ULT contracts and the STPCD appear more significant in reality.

They point, specifically, to the “rarely cover” clause in the STPCD. This states that, other than in cases of staff employed specifically to provide cover: “Teachers should be required to provide cover [for absent teaching colleagues] only rarely, and only in circumstances that are not foreseeable.”

The NEU says that in practice this means that teachers should only, under the national contract, be providing cover during an absolute emergency, such as a colleague being taken ill part-way through the working day.

By contrast, ULT’s contract, says the union, is less exacting in terms of the demands it makes on the employer. It states: “Teachers may be required to cover for absent colleagues but not usually for more than one hour per week on average across the whole teaching year.”

The union states that, in reality, teachers at ULT are much more likely to have to give up PPA time to cover for absent colleagues. And, because they can never be sure when this will happen, they end up doing PPA tasks outside of school hours, in order to make sure they are done. This can increase working time.

A union source said that, at a large meeting of UL NEU reps last summer, cover had been identified as a key area of concern. A rep at one academy said that requests for staff to cover were “frequent” and “last minute,” while a rep at another school said they were aware of a colleague who had “been used five times for cover over the past three weeks”.

When Education Uncovered put these points to ULT, the response was robust. It pointed out that, as well as setting out the 1,265 hours of “directed time,” the STPCD also states: “a teacher must work such reasonable additional hours as may be necessary to enable the effective discharge of the teacher’s professional duties, including in particular planning and preparing courses and lessons; and assessing, monitoring, recording and reporting on the learning needs, progress and achievements of assigned pupils.”

The trust said: “In other words, STPCD requires a teacher to work an unlimited amount of time beyond directed time (with the only restriction a reference to the Working Time Directive limit of 48 hours per week).

“The Group’s [UL’s] 37.5 hour contract is like any other normal professional contract as seen across the whole public sector – it specifies the total working time we are expecting from teachers. This 37.5 hour per week is much more closely the equivalent of the 48h Working Time Directive assumption in STPCD than the 1,265h.

“So the NEU comparison is completely false equivalence. Our experience is that teachers joining us find expectations of quality to be high but working hours to be more manageable than in previous schools.”

On cover, UL said: “It is true that the Group’s contracts don’t have the words ‘rarely cover’ in them. But the NEU have never produced any evidence whatsoever that staff are being expected to cover more lessons in United Learning schools than in other schools…indeed many of our schools follow a model of cover supervision which makes it extremely unlikely that a member of teaching staff will be asked to cover a lesson.”

However, the NEU source responded that they did not know any UL teacher who was only working for 37.5 hours a week in total.

They added: “UL’s comparison of their 37.5 hour working week being like another professional job is false. Teachers can never fully ‘organise their own time to discharge their professional responsibilities’ because, by necessity, they work the majority of their working day to a timetable where they are required to teach certain classes during certain hours, and therefore cannot undertake other administrative work during this time. To claim otherwise is a nonsense.

“United Learning, as an employer, do not have contractual measures to reduce teachers’ ‘directed’ tasks, eg teaching sessions, meetings, break duties etc. Therefore, without evidence of meaningful, employer-wide initiatives to reduce the other elements of teacher workload (marking, admin, planning, assessment of work, etc) we cannot assume that UL teachers work substantially fewer hours than in other schools.

“We certainly do not believe that the majority of UL teachers fit their work within 37.5 hours in an average week. Given this, we believe that the leeway afforded by the UL contract to allow schools to potentially direct teachers for up to 37.5 hours each week represents a worse deal than the STPCD terms.”

They added: “The only thing about the directed time [is that] at least it puts a maximum on the amount of time you have to spend in school doing something that your headteacher has directed you to do. In the United Learning contract, it’s hard to pin it down even to saying that [for the 37.5 hours per week], because it’s so difficult to calculate.”

The Harris Federation

The Harris Federation, England’s second-biggest academy trust with 55 schools, is a third of the major chains which has gained media coverage for offering teachers more pay than they would earn in the non-STPCD sector.

The chain offers what it calls a “Harris Bonus” of £1,500-£2,000. However, again the terms include a longer working year. In Harris’s case, this is 1,695 hours of directed time.

So that equates to 30 hours more, or almost a week, of directed time compared to the 1,265 hours of the STPCD.

Still, at first glance this in itself would appear a relatively good deal, with the £2,000 for less than a week’s extra work being a higher rate than classroom teachers earn for their 1,265 hours. Compared, for example, to the examples of M1 and M6 teachers cited above, the pay rate if £2,000 is given for 30 extra hours’ work would equate to £66.67 per hour, specifically for those 30 extra hours of directed time.

That said, there is controversy over Harris’s overall pay and conditions arrangements, with the federation known to work its teachers hard, as illustrated by the fact that 18 of its secondary schools and sixth forms are currently the subject of formal ballots for strike action by the NEU.

More specifically in relation to the value of Harris’s terms and conditions against the national contract, it is interesting that at one primary school where teachers have faced a choice in recent months as to whether to opt for the former or the latter, the advice from the union has been not to opt for the Harris contract, despite the “Harris Bonus”.

The former Byron Court primary, in Brent, north London, was forcibly transferred to Harris at the start of last term, despite an energetic parent and staff campaign in opposition. That situation means that, as with every academy conversion, the “TUPE” transfer of employment scenario applies. This means staff have had had the choice as to whether to stick with the STPCD terms and conditions they were on when the school was with the local authority, or to go for a Harris contract.

Jenny Cooper, NEU branch secretary, said the advice from the union was to stick with the terms and conditions which applied under Brent. She said that, in one other school in the borough that had joined Harris, in some cases members had opted for Harris’s terms but ended up regretting it.

Ms Cooper said that teachers were wary of signing up to longer hours within Harris’s contracts, despite the extra pay, and that the reality was that the trust could vary the terms if it chose. By contrast, TUPE meant that a teacher on the old contract which had applied under Brent would have a range of rights guaranteed.

Harris does not reply to requests for comment from Education Uncovered.

What will happen under the bill?

All of these details could possibly become significant under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently at the public committee stage in the House of Commons.

The bill, as introduced before Christmas, would have curtailed some academy “freedoms,” including around teachers’ pay and conditions.

Specifically, academy trusts would have to follow the STPCD, so that it would apply to academies in the same way as local authority maintained schools.

Two weeks ago, after complaints from the academies sector that this would stop it paying teachers more than they would receive in non-academies, the government announced it would table an amendment to the bill, making it clear that academies would be free to pay what they liked, so long as it was above a pay “floor”.

In addition, academies would only have to have “due regard” to other aspects of national pay and conditions.

The latter looked, in particular, to be a spectacular concession to the academies sector, given the content of this piece. It might seem to have set up the prospect of a trust having said it had considered the STPCD, and decided to ignore it. Thus arrangements such as Ark’s 8am-5pm working week would be unaffected.

When the amendment was actually published, it said that academies – and local authority maintained schools -  “may vary [from the STPCD] in the best interests of their pupils and staff”.

However, Schools Week reported that a DfE “policy update” had stated that the new move would “require academy schools and alternative provision academies to have regard to the whole of the STPCD in determining the pay and conditions of their teachers”.

Crucially, perhaps, it added: “This means they must follow [the STPCD] unless they have a good reason not to.”

This, perhaps, suggests that arrangements such as those applying at these trusts could be scrapped, unless Ark, United and Harris could persuade the DfE that this should not happen.

This might imply, given the Ark case above, for example, that the new legislation would effectively increase the pay-per-contracted hour that teachers within the chain, currently on an Ark contract, receive.

Will that happen? Well, with there not being any suggestion that the pay “floor” will be applied to pay-per-contracted-hour, rather than absolute pay, the question seems open at the moment.

Union sources also point out that, for all the complaints from multi-academy trusts and their supporters about the bill as originally published damaging their ability to pay teachers more, in reality the STPCD already offers such flexibility that, at least for the vast majority of teachers, they could receive the extra cash even under the existing national arrangements.

This is because the STPCD only sets out recommended pay points within a very wide envelope, such that teachers are paid, for example, on the main pay scale, or on the upper pay scale, but with the precise points within that only advisory and left to the discretion of individual governing bodies. Thus, for example, most of ARK or ULT’s extra pay at existing points on the pay spine could be accommodated easily within the existing STPCD framework – and these trusts would remain free to pay most of their teachers more, even within the current STPCD.

Overall this debate could do with a sense that while in certain cases academy trusts are paying their teachers more than they would normally expect in a non-STPCD set-up, this can come with the quid pro quo of expecting more of them in return.

-Ark’s response to my query on this, in full, said: “Teachers on the main and upper pay scales on an ARK contract are expected to be available between 8am-5pm – they are given approximately a 2.5% uplift on their salary at each point on the pay scale above the STPCD rates to recognise this.  In practice, Principals can agree flexibility within these hours if necessary, so it doesn’t mean that all teachers must be at school between 8am and 5pm every day.

Our directed hours include provision for significant additional training time, dedicated co-planning time, as well as 10% Planning, Preparation and Assessment (PPA) time. It is not in a school’s interest to overburden staff, so we ensure that classroom contact time is reasonable. 

Ark invests heavily in continuous professional development for our staff, with teaching staff allocated a minimum of 10 days for professional development (which is 5 days above the national standard).  We know this is greatly valued by teachers and makes their jobs more rewarding, while supporting excellence in teaching and ultimately driving improved educational outcomes for the children in our schools.”