The Datum Report

Occupation 2316 · Professional occupations

Special and additional needs education teaching professionals

Half of full-time special and additional needs education teaching professionals in the UK earn more than £47,432 a year, and half earn less.

Special and additional needs education teaching professionals organise and provide instruction at a variety of different levels to children who have emotional, behavioural or learning difficulties or physical disabilities. These professionals may also work with exceptionally gifted pupils.

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 Secondary Education, or, in Scotland, PGDE – Professional Graduate Diploma in Education). Additionally, prior experience in mainstream teaching is usually required, and further training for special needs teaching may be mandatory. A DBS check is mandatory

What the work involves

• creates a safe, stimulating and supportive learning environment for students
• assesses student’s abilities, identifies student’s needs and devises curriculum and rota of teaching duties accordingly
• gives instruction, using techniques appropriate to the student’s disability
• develops and adapts conventional teaching methods to meet the individual student’s needs
• encourages the student to develop self-help skills to circumvent the limitations imposed by their disability
• prepares, assigns and corrects exercises to record and evaluate students’ progress
• supervises students in classroom and maintains discipline
• liaises with other professionals, such as social workers, speech and language therapists and educational psychologists
• updates and maintains students’ records to monitor development and progress
• discusses student’s progress with parents and other teaching professionals

Also called

Behaviour support teacher · Deputy head teacher (special/additional needs school) · Learning support teacher · Special educational needs coordinator · Special needs teacher

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for special and additional needs 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. 9 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 · Primary education teaching professionals · Secondary education teaching professionals · Teachers of english as a foreign language · Teaching professionals n.e.c.