What STPCD means for school cover

The School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document is the statutory pay and conditions for teachers in local-authority-maintained schools in England. It is updated most years. The 2025 document applies from 1 September 2025. Academies are not automatically bound by every line, though many follow it, and staff who transferred in often keep contractual rights. This page is a reading aid. The document on GOV.UK is the source. If a blog and the PDF disagree, the PDF wins.

The cover line

Paragraph 50.7 says teachers supervise and, so far as practicable, teach pupils whose timetabled teacher is unavailable, subject to paragraph 52.7. Paragraph 52.7 says teachers should be required to provide that cover only rarely, and only in circumstances that are not foreseeable. It does not apply to teachers employed wholly or mainly to provide cover.

There is no number of hours in that sentence. 'Rarely' is not defined as three periods a week or any other staffroom figure. Foreseeable means you could have seen it coming: a course, a trip, a meeting in the diary. Illness on the morning is the usual example of something that was not foreseeable. A trip you have known about for a month is not.

PPA is separate

Paragraph 52.5 says PPA must be at least 10% of a teacher's timetabled teaching time, in blocks of not less than half an hour, and that a teacher must not be required to carry out any other duties during PPA time. Cover is another duty. A rota that takes PPA first looks full on paper and leaves teachers without their planning time. It is the thing the paragraph forbids.

What this does to a rota

Put people employed to cover, and other support staff your policy allows, ahead of class teachers. Do not treat a known absence as a 07:40 surprise. Do not count PPA as available. Do not describe a class split across three rooms as 'no cover needed'. Keep a tally so 'rarely' is something you can show, rather than a feeling. Cover supervisor and teacher is the role difference. How to plan the morning is the order of work.

Why the case studies use leadership pay

STPCD also sets the leadership pay range. Our UK savings models use England (outside London) leadership points for 2025/26, because the person who owns the rota is often a head, a SENCO or an assistant head. A Group-style illustration in the primary study uses leadership point L13. The secondary study uses assistant-head pay for the hours. Loaded cost adds the Teachers' Pension employer contribution and employer National Insurance. The method, the points and what is left out are on savings. Those pages cost the time spent running the rota. They are not a calculation of how much you may ask a teacher to cover.

Support staff are not on that spine. Costing a TA's cover hour at a head's rate would overstate it. Costing the head's morning at a TA's rate would understate it. Match the rate to the person who actually loses the hour.

What changed for 2025/26

Pay points moved with the 2025 award. The cover wording quoted above is in the 2025 document. Do not keep using a 2022 blog's paragraph numbers without checking, and do not keep using an old 'hours of cover per year' myth. If you only remember one check each September, open the PDF and search for 'only rarely'.

What SchoolRota will and will not track

The board can count how often a person is used, block PPA if you tell it that a weekly block is busy time, and keep the published list. It does not know whether your school is a maintained school, an academy, or sitting under a transferred contract. It will not decide that a particular cover was foreseeable. You set the rules. Cover management follows them. The legal judgement stays with the school.

Using the pay figures without fooling yourself

Leadership points in the savings pages are England outside London for 2025/26. London and the fringe are different ranges. If you drop an Inner London salary into a model built on the rest of England, you will overstate the cost of an hour. If you use an old year's point because it was in a slide, you will understate it. Open the current document when you redo the sum. The hourly method on our pages divides loaded pay by 1,650 hours. That is a working-year assumption, not directed time. Directed time is 1,265 hours. Using 1,265 would make each hour look more expensive. We did not, on purpose.

None of that tells you whether a particular cover this morning was allowed. It tells you what the rota owner's time costs if that person is on the leadership spine. A school business manager costing their own hour should use their own pay, plus on-costs, and ignore L13. The document is for teachers. Support staff are a different contract. Mixing them is how a business case becomes an argument. If you cite a paragraph number in a staff meeting, read it that morning. Paragraph numbers have moved between editions. The words 'only rarely' are the ones to search for.

Keep a copy of the paragraph you rely on with the policy, not a paraphrase from a union page that might be a year old. Unions explain the document well, and they also argue a position. The statutory line is the one in the PDF. If your cover practice cannot be explained from that line in a sentence, you are running a local custom. Say so, and do not pretend it is the STPCD. Staff can live with a local custom. They cannot live with a custom that is described as the law. Check the PDF again each September, when the new document is published, before you brief staff. Note the year on your copy.

Related

• Cover supervisor and teacher: what is different
• How to manage teacher absences
• School cover management: 12 practices that hold up

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