Education employs more people than almost any other part of the British economy, and pays them across an extraordinary range: from a head teacher on more than twice the national median to a midday supervisor whose annual pay, for the hours the job offers, is below what most people earn in two months. This is the whole of that range, from the top down, using the only source that measures all of it the same way.
The figures are median gross annual pay from the 2025 provisional Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, drawn from PAYE records across Great Britain. Each occupation is shown two ways: all employees, which is ONS's headline, and full-time only, which is the figure to use when comparing a job offer. In education the two diverge more than almost anywhere else, and the gap is part of the story.
The best-paid jobs in education
- Head teachers and principals — £70,977 (full-time £72,192). 63,000 jobs. The eighth best-paid occupation in the entire ASHE table, ahead of senior police officers and financial managers. Up 2.4% on the year. Full breakdown.
- Higher education teaching professionals — £46,494 (full-time £52,835). 246,000 jobs, the largest professional group in the sector after school teachers. The 13.6% gap between the two figures reflects how much university teaching is done part-time. Full breakdown.
- Education managers — £45,043 (full-time £46,581). 51,000 jobs; the deputy heads, bursars and department heads who run institutions without leading them.
- Secondary school teachers — £44,246 (full-time £47,632). 466,000 jobs, the biggest occupation in the sector, and the most precisely measured: a sampling error of 1.6%. Up 4.2%.
- Primary school teachers — £42,031 (full-time £45,939). 400,000 jobs. Up 7.0% on the year, the largest rise among the teaching grades.
- Education advisers and school inspectors — £41,535 (full-time £44,549). 22,000 jobs.
- Special needs teachers — £40,363 (full-time £47,432). 37,000 jobs. The all-employees figure understates this job badly: full-time special needs teachers earn 17.5% more than the headline suggests, and within a few hundred pounds of secondary teachers. Up 12.4%, the fastest rise in the list.
- Further education teachers — £38,642 (full-time £42,218). 55,000 jobs. The lowest-paid qualified teaching grade, by a clear margin.
A head teacher earns 52% more than a full-time secondary teacher. Between the top of the classroom grades and the bottom, secondary to further education, the full-time gap is £5,414. The teacher salary page covers the three school grades together.
Below the qualified grades
Everything above is a graduate profession. The rest of the sector, which employs more people than the teaching grades combined, looks like this:
- Nursery teachers: £31,425 (full-time £37,593) — ONS marks both figures as imprecise
- Early education and childcare services managers: £28,511 (full-time £30,140)
- School secretaries: £22,155 (full-time £26,463)
- Higher level teaching assistants: £22,050 (full-time £25,434)
- Early education and childcare practitioners: £19,516 (full-time £23,717), 109,000 jobs
- Early education and childcare assistants: £19,165 (full-time £24,742), 83,000 jobs
- Teaching assistants: £18,024 (full-time £21,239), 255,000 jobs
- Educational support assistants: £17,086 (full-time £21,448), 138,000 jobs
- School midday and crossing patrol staff: £4,263, 67,000 jobs
The teaching assistant figure is the one to pause on. A quarter of a million people, a median of £18,024, and even the full-time median of £21,239 is more than £11,000 short of the £32,890 that all UK employees earn. Our teaching assistant page leads on the full-time figure for exactly this reason: the headline number describes a job most people do part-time and term-time, and it is not what the job pays for a full week.
The midday supervisor figure of £4,263 is not a mistake. It is the median annual pay of people employed for a couple of hours a day in term time. ONS publishes a full-time figure of £21,678 for the same group, without an error estimate, from a sample that must be very small indeed.
Why the two columns matter so much here
In most professional occupations, the all-employees median and the full-time median sit within 5% of each other. In education, the gap runs from 2% for head teachers to 18% for teaching assistants and 17.5% for special needs teachers. The reason is simply the share of part-time work: 108,000 of 255,000 teaching assistant jobs are full-time; 48,000 of 63,000 head teacher jobs are.
This means that a ranking of education jobs on the headline figure quietly penalises the roles where part-time work is common, and special needs teaching is the clearest casualty. On full-time pay it is fourth in the sector, level with secondary teaching. On the headline it is seventh. Neither figure is wrong; they answer different questions. The all-employees figure is what the occupation earns. The full-time figure is what the job pays.
What moved this year
Year-on-year changes in the median, unadjusted for inflation, against a 4.1% rise for all UK employees:
- Special needs teachers: +12.4%
- Early education and childcare practitioners: +9.3%
- Education advisers and inspectors: +8.2%
- Primary teachers: +7.0%
- Education managers: +6.4%
- Teaching assistants: +4.4%
- Secondary teachers: +4.2%
- Further education teachers: +3.7%
- Head teachers: +2.4%
- Higher education teaching professionals: +1.8%
The pattern is a compression from below: the lowest-paid qualified grades and the classroom support roles rose fastest, the best-paid grades slowest. University teaching, second in the pay ranking, had the smallest rise of anything in the sector.
Reading the figures
ASHE records what employers paid, not the pay scales they paid from. For school teachers in England the two should be close, because the statutory pay and conditions document sets the scale, but ASHE also includes Scotland and Wales, where scales differ, and it counts allowances and TLR payments in gross pay. For university staff, the national spine covers most but not all institutions.
Every figure above is for employees. Private tutors, supply teachers working through their own companies, and childminders are self-employed and outside the survey. And the head teacher figure sits inside a distribution: the bottom quarter earn under £56,666 and the top quarter over £83,340, which is roughly the difference between a small primary and a large secondary. To see where any figure in this sector falls, the salary check will place it against the occupation's full distribution.