Getting pay right in the education sector isn’t just about compliance—it’s about fairness, transparency, and making sure schools and colleges can attract and retain the best staff. Pay structures sit at the heart of this process, setting out clear systems that determine how employees progress through different pay scales and bands.
While pay structures exist in every sector, education has some of the most regulated frameworks, with national teacher pay scales, spine points, and annual adjustments that need to be managed consistently and accurately.
In this guide, we’ll explain different types of pay structures before diving deeper into how teacher pay scales work.
Pay Structures
A pay structure is a formal fixed framework that defines how much compensation employees receive based on different levels—known as pay scales.
Pay scales are fixed systems created by employers, used to determine an employee’s base salary; they bring into consideration job role, skill level, and contract type. These are typically split into three bands:
- A minimum (the starting pay)
- A midpoint (often based on market averages)
- A maximum (the highest salary at that level)
The percentage difference between the minimum and maximum salary is known as the span of the pay band. A greater span means more progression opportunity.
Get the latest insights and best practice guides, direct to your inbox.
Different types of pay structures
Pay structures have two key characteristics:
- The number of bands within the structure
- The span of each band.
But while they have these two things in common, there are various types of pay structures—all with different focuses. Below, we’ll explain different types of pay structures available to employers:
Spot Salaries
With a spot salary, there is a single hourly or weekly pay rate, or a single annual salary, attached to each job or possibly each person within an organisation.
As this is typically negotiated by employer and employee to aid in attraction and retention, they can vary per employee within the same organisation.
While they offer greater opportunity for personalisation and individualised compensation, this rate lacks the transparency and standardised approach of pay spines and does not strictly constitute a pay structure. Issues can also arise as you onboard more employees, making it time-consuming to consider each role on a case-by-case basis.
They are best suited to start-ups, small businesses, or teams with unique roles that are hard to benchmark against the market or your pre-determined pay structure.
Narrow-graded pay structures
Narrow-graded pay structures consist of a series of different pay grades, usually ten or more, into which jobs of similar worth are placed.
This type of structure works well in public sector roles with formal career pathways (government agencies or education, for example). Thanks to clearly defined grades, narrow-graded pay structures help organisations ensure compliance and promote equity with similar roles earning similar compensation.
Advancement comes in the form of moving within the grade in service-linked increments or being promoted to a higher grade; but, since the range is narrow, employees tend to advance quickly.
Pay spines and spine points
A pay spine is a structure that outlines the different pay grades or salaries within an organisation. Each pay spine contains several fixed pay grades with incremental steps (known as spine points) that will be determined by role and experience. This means that employees with similar roles are typically paid the same salary within the pay spine structure.
Having a pay spine that is accessible to employees helps to keep consistency across your organisation, with transparency over salary progression and minimising the risk of pay discrepancies.
Broadbanding
Broadbanding brings together several job levels into a few broader pay bands. Typically comprising of four or five pay bands, this type of structure allows for greater pay flexibility, giving organisations the freedom to reward performance or adjust to market changes.
This type of structure is used most in tech, finance, and professional services firms to reward experience without overcomplicating titles.
Typically, there are no pay progression limits within each band, encouraging skill growth, although some employers have re-introduced a greater degree of structure to counter equal pay or career advancement concerns.
Market-based pay structure
Using external data from industry benchmarks and surveys, market-based pay structures set salary ranges based on market trends rather than internal titles. This approach gives a competitive advantage, especially when wages vary by location or industry.
While market-based structures include defined pay grades, the key difference is how those ranges are determined. Instead of basing pay on internal rankings, salaries are aligned to what similar roles earn in the market—keeping salaries fair with market standards. This does, however, mean that salaries must be adaptable to stay up-to-date with the latest standard.
While many sectors use one or more of these approaches, education is unique in having nationally regulated pay scales and annual spine point uplifts. Let’s look at how that works in practice.
How do pay scales work in education?
Teacher pay scales are designed to recognise and reward the hard work and dedication of teachers. In the education industry, the structure is based on a national framework for salaries across the country.
This teacher pay scale is divided into three ranges, including the main pay range, upper pay range, and leadership pay range.
When teachers begin their career, known as early career teachers (ECTs), they start in the main pay range. They will progress up the pay range as they gain experience and meet the relevant standards. Qualified teachers can also apply to move onto the upper pay range to access higher salaries.
Schools can also offer additional payments and benefits to their teachers, like teaching and learning responsibility (TLR) payments, special educational needs (SEN) allowances, and performance bonuses.
Teachers’ pay scales for England, excluding London and the Fringe
The independent School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) has recommended a pay award of 4% to uplift the pay and allowances for teachers in England from 1 September 2025.
The government has accepted the recommendations and has also announced a package of additional funding for schools to help them meet most costs for the pay award.
Advisory pay point structure from September 2025
Spine point | Rest of England | London fringe | Outer London | Inner London |
M1 (Minimum) | £32,916 | £34,398 | £37,870 | £40,317 |
M2 | £34,823 | £36,373 | £39,851 | £42,234 |
M3 | £37,101 | £38,627 | £41,935 | £44,238 |
M4 | £39,556 | £41,075 | £44,128 | £46,238 |
M5 | £42,057 | £43,545 | £46,800 | £48,952 |
M6 (Maximum) | £45,352 | £46,839 | £50,474 | £52,300 |
Spine point | Rest of England | London fringe | Outer London | Inner London |
M1 (Minimum) | £32,916 | £34,398 | £37,870 | £40,317 |
M2 | £34,823 | £36,373 | £39,851 | £42,234 |
M3 | £37,101 | £38,627 | £41,935 | £44,238 |
M4 | £39,556 | £41,075 | £44,128 | £46,238 |
M5 | £42,057 | £43,545 | £46,800 | £48,952 |
M6 (Maximum) | £45,352 | £46,839 | £50,474 | £52,300 |
Spine point | Rest of England | London fringe | Outer London | Inner London |
U1 (Minimum) | £22,601 | £24,066 | £26,789 | £28,343 |
U2 | £25,193 | £26,656 | £29,383 | £30,935 |
U3 | £27,785 | £29,248 | £31,974 | £33,528 |
U4 | £30,071 | £31,532 | £34,265 | £35,814 |
U5 | £32,667 | £34,126 | £36,856 | £38,402 |
U6 (Maximum) | £35,259 | £36,718 | £39,450 | £40,994 |
You can find Teaching and Learning Responsibilities, Ranges for Headteachers, and additional pay scales, on the NASUWT website.
How can Cintra support education payroll?
With the complexities of different pay grades and spines, as well as the various roles involved, education payroll isn’t a small task to undertake. But Cintra is well equipped to handle anything education payroll will throw at you—in fact, it’s an area we specialise in.
In Cintra, we have a module designed to hold and link all the payroll data you need, covering all your pay scales and spine points. It’s as simple as connecting an employee to an existing pay scale and watching the payroll magic happen!
Changing spine points
Let’s look at an example; you might have a policy in place where relevant employees advance one spine point every year. With Cintra, this can be done with the click of a button, no inputting data necessary, making moving from point A to point B an easy task.
Cintra identifies employees at the top of their band, ensuring only eligible people move up. It also enforces rules for staff on probation or excluded from uplifts.
The spine point module can also tell which posts should be incremented, and which posts are static (and stay on the same spine point until moved).
Spine point increases
Spine point increases are the annual uplift in value that changes each year according to inflation or an agreed increase.
Say an employee on Spine A is staying on Spine A. The value may increase from £20k to £21k from one year to the next. Within Cintra, this change is as easy as assigning a new value to that spine point, and all applicable employees on Spine A will receive the necessary increase.
And the annual task of updating spine point salaries and increasing spine points can be carried out in under 60 minutes in Cintra, rather than hours and hours of manual data changes. Plus, with output reports automatically created to log any changes, you have all the information you need at your fingertips, no more tricky report writing!
Make pay structures and spine points simple with Cintra
With Cintra, you’re equipped with a system built to handle the intricacies of education pay. From automatic spine point movements to stress-free annual uplifts, we make it easy for schools, colleges, and academies to stay compliant and give staff the clarity they deserve.
While no one can make education payroll simple (as much as we might wish), Cintra takes the manual headache of education payroll and turns it into something much more manageable, allowing teams to focus less on admin and more on supporting the people who make education possible.
PAYROLL SERVICES FOR SCHOOLS
Find out more about Cintra's HR and payroll services for the education sector, tailor-made for your schools unique needs.
