While summer is here and teachers are off enjoying a well-earned break, somewhere in the corridors of power discussions are taking place that could affect your pay - especially if you’re a teacher in a maintained school.

Because, while the headline takeaway from Bridget Phillipson’s letter to the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) was her request for it to provide three years’ worth of pay recommendations, she also asked it about bonuses.

Specifically, the education secretary noted that at present maintained schools “cannot currently make non-consolidated payments (including bonuses)” to their teachers - even though academy schools can use them to “recruit, retain or reward their staff”.

As such, she asked the STRB to provide recommendations on whether maintained schools should receive this option to reward staff beyond standard salary band changes or annual pay increases.

It’s a consideration that Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research, says has logic: “Extending the ability of maintained schools to offer additional payments that academies have had the freedom to offer is another step towards alignment across the school system.”

Teacher pay: should schools give bonuses?

Louise Hatswell, pay specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, also says that creating a level playing field would be sensible.

“We agree that maintained schools should have the same flexibilities as academies over pay and conditions to help with staff recruitment and retention in very challenging circumstances,” she says.

However, she adds that her organisation would “need to consult over the merits or otherwise of bonuses” to consider the idea fully.

Ian Hartwright, head of policy at the NAHT school leaders’ union, is even more circumspect.

“There’s a real need to carefully think through the possible benefits, bear traps, unintended consequences and perverse incentives associated with this suggestion,” he says.

“NAHT will be examining the evidence and our members’ views on this, and all the questions posed in the remit ahead of our submission to the STRB.”

This cautious language may seem surprising - surely the opportunity for teachers to earn more would always be welcome? Of course, the reality is that little happens in education without unintended consequences.

For example, why should one staff member receive a bonus and not another? What would the criteria be for offering bonuses? Who would sign-off a decision to award one? Which metrics would be used to decide if a bonus should be awarded? How much extra work would this create for leaders?

These are questions that Julia Polley, headteacher at The Wensleydale School, says highlight the ethical issues around bringing bonuses into education.

“Teachers are not in business and cannot be held to targets in terms of grades for financial bonuses,” she says. “Teaching is subtle. You can’t buy grade success. It takes time, patience and a real understanding of community.”

Pay déjà vu

In fact, it was for these myriad reasons that the STRB recommended in 2023 that performance-related pay (PRP) - which linked outcomes to pay increases, rather than one-off bonuses - should be stopped.

This recommendation was duly carried out by the government in 2024 - a move that was welcomed by the unions, which said it had become “increasingly clear” that PRP “drives unnecessary workload and bureaucracy for leaders and teachers alike”.

By that point some multi-academy trusts had already ditched PRP anyway, using their freedoms under the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD) to do so.

But, of course, this freedom goes both ways: while maintained schools can’t use PRP now, academies can - just as they can, and do, offer bonuses.

For example, a report in 2017 for the government’s Office of Manpower Economics (now called the Office for the Pay Review Bodies) found several instances of MATs using both performance and recruitment/retention bonuses.

One small MAT was found to be offering recruitment and retention bonuses worth £2,000 to £5,000 to new staff (this was repayable if they left within two years), while a large MAT was offering “performance bonuses” of £500 to £1,000”.

It’s no doubt these sorts of options that the government thinks maintained schools should have, too, in order to level the playing field on pay.

But members of the STRB may be left scratching their heads at being asked to consider the use of bonuses for maintained schools so soon after PRP was scrapped.

Indeed, one MAT leader, speaking anonymously, says the situation seems to reveal “an absence of any theory that the government has” around pay.

“Their instincts were that pay flexibility is a bad thing, which is why they have tried to take it away from academies,” they say.

“Now they seem to think it’s such a good idea that maintained schools should have some more of it.”

Meanwhile, David Clayton, CEO of Endeavour Learning Trust, says that, despite having the ability to use bonuses, he has never used them - and he questions whether they are a proper solution to teacher recruitment and retention challenges.

“The focus needs to be on ensuring pay and conditions frameworks are fit for purpose and for the full workforce, with rates of pay that reflect the recruitment and retention crisis we’re in - and sufficient funding so that schools and trusts can provide effective support to address workload challenges,” he says.

Show schools the money

This point raises what is perhaps the most obvious obstacle to awarding bonuses: where would schools, hardly flush with cash at the best of times, find the funds to start throwing bonuses at staff?

“If and when mainstream maintained schools could be allowed to give bonuses, no one has any money,” says Polley.

Hatswell at the ASCL makes the same point - albeit using more diplomatic language.

“The straitened situation in which schools and trusts find themselves because of insufficiency of government funding means many are struggling to staff their schools, let alone pay bonuses,” she says.

Worth at the NFER concurs, noting that most academies rarely use bonuses for the same reason: “Constrained by tight budgets, research has shown most academies are not currently making extensive use of additional payments.”

Elaine Hammond, director of people at The Active Learning Trust, says this is very much the reality at her trust.

“I would not be averse to bonus payments. But this is challenging on a budget front, as it is difficult to keep up with cost-of-living awards and incremental progression, both of which are part of the support staff and teachers’ pay arrangements,” she says.

Worth says that giving this same power that academies have to maintained schools is “unlikely to make a meaningful and widespread difference to what schools and academies are doing and the retention of teachers”.

In fact, one MAT leader says that discussing bonuses in the current climate - both economic and demographic - feels like “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”.

“Most maintained schools are primaries, the part of the sector with falling rolls and finances,” they say. “Those schools will ask themselves: are we better off if we have more freedom over less money?”

Clearly, then, there is plenty for the STRB to ponder. A decision is unlikely soon, with Phillipson setting a deadline of April 2026 for an answer.

In the meantime, it’s clear that it will hear plenty of debate on the topic, but if it can come up with a solution that pleases everyone, that’ll be a bonus.

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