The Datum Report

Occupation 2314 · Professional occupations

Primary education teaching professionals

Half of full-time primary education teaching professionals in the UK earn more than £45,939 a year, and half earn less.

Primary (and middle school deemed primary) and education teaching professionals plan, organise and provide instruction to children at all levels up to the age of entry into secondary education.

How people enter it

Entry is with a first degree that provides QTS (qualified teacher status) or, in Scotland, TQ (teaching qualification); or other relevant degree followed by further postgraduate training (most commonly PGCE – Postgraduate Certificate in Primary Education, or, in Scotland, PGDE – Professional Graduate Diploma in Education). Further and higher professional qualifications are required for some teaching posts. A DBS check is mandatory.

What the work involves

• prepares and delivers courses and lessons in accordance with curriculum requirements and teaches a range of subjects
• prepares, assigns and corrects exercises and examinations to record and evaluate students’ progress
• prepares students for external examinations and administers and invigilates these examinations
• maintains records of students’ progress and development
• teaches simple songs and rhymes, reads stories and organises various activities to promote language, social and physical development
• undertakes pastoral duties
• supervises teaching assistants and trainees
• discusses progress with student, parents and/or other education professionals
• assists with or plans and develops curriculum and rota of teaching duties

Also called

Deputy head teacher (primary school) · Infant teacher · Junior school teacher · Primary school teacher

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for primary education teaching professionals, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 10 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Further education teaching professionals · Higher education teaching professionals · Nursery education teaching professionals · Secondary education teaching professionals · Special and additional needs education teaching professionals · Teachers of english as a foreign language · Teaching professionals n.e.c.