What has happened to college teacher pay in England?

In 2010–11, the median salary (in today’s prices) stood at around £48,000 for a school teacher and £42,500 for a college teacher – a gap of about 14% in terms of college teacher pay. Between 2010–11 and 2017–18, the median salary for both sets of teachers followed similar downward trajectories. However, in the following three years up to 2020–21, median school teacher salary increased by 3% while the pay of college teachers plateaued at around £38,000 in today’s prices. Both school and college teachers have experienced large real-terms cuts in the last two years, but the decline has been more severe for college teachers. Between 2020–21 and 2022–23, the median salary has fallen by 7% for school teachers and 9% for college teachers.

The median salary for school teachers is currently around £41,500 and that for college teachers is around £34,500. This means that between 2010–11 and 2022–23, the median salary for a school teacher has fallen by 14%, while the median salary for a college teacher has fallen by 19%. The gap in median salary between school and college teachers is now over £7,000 or 21%, which is the largest gap since at least 2010–11 and possibly much earlier.

Change in median salary is a useful indicator for how the average teacher in colleges and schools has fared over the last decade, but as we have noted, median salary does not just reflect decisions about pay level; it can also reflect changes in the characteristics of the workforce. The 14% real-terms decline in median school teacher pay being slightly larger than the decline in recommended pay scales stated earlier (i.e. between 5% and 13%) may reflect greater use of less experienced teachers in schools over time or schools moving teachers up the salary pay scale at a slower rate.

To directly compare pay levels for teachers with similar levels of teaching experience, we look at the starting salaries of college and school teachers in England. Unlike for school teachers, there is not a fixed starting salary for college teachers. Therefore, in Figure 5, we show the starting salary for school teachers and two different time series for the starting salary of college teachers: we track the lowest point in the pay scale for an entry-level qualified FE lecturer (in green) and the median starting salary for college teachers (in blue). The median starting salary is above the pay scale value, which reflects the fact that most college teachers receive more than the minimum level for an entry-level qualified FE lecturer.

Figure 5. Starting salary for college and school teachers in England

Note and source: The college teacher (pay scale) starting salary series is constructed using the recommended pay levels for an entry-level qualified FE lecturer (point 23 in the FE pay scale) between 2010–11 and 2021–22 from University and College Union records on English FE pay scales. We forecast the 2022–23 starting salary based on the AoC’s 2.5% recommended pay award for 2022–23. The college teacher (median starting salary) series is constructed using median starting salary between 2010–11 and 2019–20 for college teachers from table 3.1 in Further education college workforce analysis: tables; for 2020–21 to 2022–23, we forecast median salaries using the University and College Union’s English FE pay scales. Starting salaries for school teachers are the recommended pay levels for an entry-level school teacher outside London (point M1 in the school pay scale) from the School Teachers’ Review Body pay recommendations. Real-terms values between 2010–11 and 2021–22 calculated based on average value of CPIH index in the relevant academic year. Forecasts for 2022–23 inflation (CPI only) taken from OBR EFO March 2023.

At the beginning of the last decade, college teachers had a higher starting salary than school teachers. In 2010–11, the median starting salary (in today’s prices) was around £34,000 for a college teacher and £29,500 for a school teacher. Between the start of the decade and 2017–18, there was a real-terms decline in the starting salary of both school and college teachers. The median salary of new college teachers fell by 4% in real terms during this period, while the pay of new school teachers fell by 7%.

As with median salaries, 2017–18 marked a departure point. While the starting salary of college teachers continued to fall, the starting salary of school teachers grew by 7% between 2017–18 and 2020–21. By 2020, the starting salary of school teachers was almost the same as it was at the start of the decade (around £29,500), but median college teacher pay had fallen by 6% (to around £32,000).

Since 2020–21, the starting salaries of both sets of teachers have fallen in real terms. However, the fall in starting salaries for college teachers has been far more dramatic. In 2022–23, the pay of new college teachers decreased by 7% in real terms whereas the pay of new school teachers fell by 1%. As a result, a school teacher starting today earns 5% less in real terms than they would have done in 2010, while a college teacher earns at least 14% less in real terms.

The difference in starting salaries between colleges and schools looks set to open up in the future. New school teachers have only experienced a 1% real-terms cut to pay this academic year as they received a 9% pay increase in 2022–23 as part of the government’s commitment to increase starting salaries for school teachers. In the next academic year, starting salaries for school teachers are set to increase to £30,000, which may mean that for the first time on record, new school teachers will earn more than the average new college teacher.

2. College teacher retention rates

We now turn to analysing teacher retention. Unlike for the school workforce, the Department for Education (DfE) does not publish regular statistics on the FE workforce. The DfE only launched the FE workforce data collection in 2021–22, but so far has not published statistics from this data collection. As a result, in the analysis that follows, we rely upon data from a report published by the DfE on the FE workforce in 2021, which means that some of the statistics are slightly dated but they are the latest data available to us. The statistics presented on college teacher retention rates encompass teachers in general FE colleges and in sixth-form colleges.

In Figure 6, we show the retention rates for school and college teachers (as measured in 2019). At that point, college teachers were far more likely to leave the profession than school teachers. Around 25% of college teachers left the profession after one year compared with 15% of school teachers and, three years in, almost 50% of college teachers and 27% of school teachers have left. Although there is significant attrition amongst school teachers, the share of school teachers remaining in the profession begins to plateau at around 60% after five years. In contrast, the share of college teachers continues to fall such that less than a quarter of college teachers remain in the profession ten years after they begin teaching.

Figure 6. Teacher retention rates for colleges and schools, 2019

Note and source: The graph shows teacher retention rates in 2019, i.e. the retention rates for 1 year later correspond to teachers who began in 2018, while the retention rates for 2 years later correspond to teachers who began in 2017 and so on. The data are from table 3.2 in Further education college workforce analysis: tables for college teacher retention rates and School workforce in England data for school teacher retention rates.

College teacher retention rates by years of experience have not changed much over time. Figure 7 shows the share of teachers still teaching in colleges by the year in which they started teaching in the sector. As one might expect, retention rates get progressively lower with time since the teacher started. Each line exhibits a slight dip, which suggests that retention rates initially worsened over the last decade. For example, 74% of college teachers starting in 2009 remained in the profession one year later, while that was true for 71% of college teachers beginning in 2012. However, in more recent years, there has been a slight increase in retention, which means that retention rates look very similar to what they were in past. This suggests that low retention rates are a structural feature of the college teaching profession.

Figure 7. Teacher retention by year started teaching in colleges

Source: Table 3.2 in Further education college workforce analysis: tables.

In Figure 8, we show the overall share of college teachers leaving the sector each year broken down by whether they move into teaching in another part of the education sector or leave teaching completely. There has been a long-term increase in the exit rate of college teachers (i.e. the share of college teachers leaving the sector each year). In the early 2000s, around 9% of all college teachers were leaving the profession each year; by 2014–15, this had increased to around 16%, which represents a significant churn in the college workforce every year. In terms of where these teachers are going, in the latest year for which we have data (2017–18), around a fifth were leaving to teach in other parts of the education sector while the other leavers left the teaching profession entirely.

Figure 8. College teachers leaving the sector by exit destination

Source: Table 4.2 in Further education college workforce analysis: tables.

An overall exit rate of 16% for college teachers represents a relatively high level of staff mobility or turnover in colleges, particularly compared with other public sector occupations. For school teachers, exit rates were about 10% leading up to 2020, while they were 10–11% across most NHS occupations and about 7–8% in the civil service.

The high turnover of staff presents a number of issues. The fact that overall college exit rates have gone up but they have been stable over time by years of experience (Figure 7) suggests that many teachers leave the profession before building up experience, which means that students will often be taught by inexperienced teachers. For college leaders, there is a continual need to recruit new staff to fill vacancies, which is especially difficult at the moment given high vacancy rates across the economy.

Future outlook

In summary, college teachers have experienced severe pay cuts over the past decade, which is likely to be a key reason why each year a large share of the workforce leave the profession, often within a few years of starting. In the coming months, the Association of Colleges is set to announce its pay recommendations for the next academic year, but college leaders face a difficult challenge in finding money within their existing budgets to fund staff remuneration as well as meet other cost pressures. Although the government has allocated additional funding to colleges in recent spending reviews, this only partially reverses the large cuts to post-16 education funding that took place up to 2020. Moreover, unlike schools, post-16 education did not receive any extra funding in the 2022 Autumn Statement, and colleges also did not receive additional support in the Spring Budget to help them meet rising cost pressures. As a result, the immediate future for the college workforce appears gloomy.