Payroll and pensions for academies and Multi Academy Trusts
One provider, one process, one point of accountability - across every school in your trust.
The challenge of trust-wide payroll
Managing payroll across a Multi-Academy Trust is genuinely complex. You’re dealing with staff employed across multiple schools, often on different contract types, different pay scales and different working patterns.
Teaching staff sit within the Teachers’ Pension Scheme. Support staff are members of the Local Government Pension Schemes. Some employees may hold roles across more than one school. And the Finance and HR teams responsible for getting it right are, in most trusts, working with limited resources.
Add to that the governance expectations on academy trusts, where accuracy, auditability and clear financial controls are non-negotiable, and the stakes of getting payroll wrong are higher than in many other organisations.
We work with trusts who need a payroll partner that understands all of this, not one that has to be briefed on the basics every time something changes.
A single, joined-up service across your whole trust
We manage payroll and pensions for your entire trust through a single, consistent service.
That means one set of processes, one team who knows your schools, and one point of contact when you need to discuss anything – whether it’s a query about a specific employee, a change in trust structure, or a question about pension submissions.
For central finance and HR teams, this removes the coordination burden of managing multiple providers or supporting individual schools that are handling payroll themselves.
Everything runs through us, consistently and accountably.
Built for the complexity of MAT payrolls
With the clear policy drive towards larger-scale, ‘strong’ Trusts, recent years have seen a significant increase in schools joining MATs, often 10 schools or more.
This brings benefits to individual schools, but complexity to shared resources such as payroll. Add to this, the increased financial burdon on trusts facing budgetary pressures and the need for increased financial governance and it is no surprise that payroll and pension management is an area many MATs look to outsource.
The Ascend Education service has been built around the needs of not just schools and single academies but larger MATs.
Pensions administration for MATs
- Multiple schools, one process
- Approval workflows that match your governance
- TPS and LGPS management across the board
- Starters, leavers and mid-year changes at scale
- Onboarding of new schools joining your trust
- Clear visibility of payroll data and costs across the organisation
- Auditable Bacs submissions
Managing pension obligations across a Trust is one of the most time-consuming aspects of education payroll.
With staff potentially spread across multiple LGPS administering authorities, depending on which local authority areas your schools sit in, and TPS obligations running in parallel, the administration is significant.
We handle all of it.
- Monthly submissions to Teachers’ Pensions
- Contributions and reporting to each relevant LGPS administering authority
- Auto-enrolment for staff outside the statutory schemes,
- All associated employee communications.
Your trust stays compliant, and your staff pension records stay accurate.
Let’s have a chat about how we can transform your education payroll and pension management
