Northampton College has won a national award for a College pay review that transformed how staff roles and salaries are structured, with judges recognising its impact on fairness, transparency and recruitment. The award highlights how the project tackled long-standing challenges across the further education sector.
The College launched the pay review in 2024 after identifying issues common within FE, including outdated grading structures, limited career progression and the risk of inequity. As a result, it partnered with the Educational Competencies Consortium (ECC) to redesign its framework using the Further Education Role Analysis (FEDRA) scheme. Throughout the process, the guiding principle was equal pay for work of equal value.
Every one of the College’s 165 roles was rewritten and independently assessed using FEDRA. In addition, the review was supported by detailed benchmarking, equality impact assessments and financial modelling. Consequently, the College was able to implement a sustainable and transparent pay structure aligned to both responsibility and long-term financial planning.
The changes resulted in hundreds of staff receiving upgraded pay grades. Importantly, areas of inequity, including gender pay gaps, were addressed as part of the process. As a result, recruitment performance improved sharply, with job applications increasing by more than 50 per cent. Student numbers also rose, demonstrating that the benefits extended beyond staff retention and into the classroom.
Jan Hutt, deputy principal at Northampton College, said: “FEDRA is the only job evaluation scheme that works in further education. This project was about equity, competitiveness and commercial decisions around benchmarking, but with a legal and moral perspective.
“The key to the project was simple: put people first. By engaging staff and unions, applying a rigorous evaluation framework and communicating openly, trust in the process grew. The new system rewards staff fairly and positions the College to attract talent and tackle sector challenges head-on.”
The review has now been named ECC’s Project of the Year. Judges praised the exceptional nature of the work, particularly its overall impact, improved reward practices and the way the approach can be replicated by other organisations.
Nicholas Johnston, chief executive at ECC, said: “Northampton College demonstrated a really positive impact on pay equality because they took great care to look at their pay structure.
“The college had less than 2.5 per cent appeals following roll-out, and have seen a 50 per cent increase in job applications year-on-year. It was a model pay and grading implementation with very clear and measurable results.”
