Sixth-form college vs school sixth form

In short

Both teach 16 to 18 year olds, and to a student they can look almost identical. But a school sixth form is part of a secondary school, while a sixth-form college is a separate institution in the further education sector – with different pay, different staff qualifications, and figures that appear in an entirely different set of statistics.

The distinction in one table

	School sixth form	Sixth-form college
What it is	Part of a secondary school	A standalone institution
Which sector	Schools	Further education
Staff status	Usually QTS	Commonly QTLS
Pay	National pay scales	Set by the college
Median teacher pay	£51,048 (all school teachers)	About £49,700
Counted in	School Workforce Census	FE Workforce collection

Why the statistics are separate

This is the part that catches people out. The Department for Education runs two different workforce collections, on different dates and with different definitions. A teacher in a school sixth form is counted among the country’s school teachers. A teacher in a sixth-form college is counted in the FE workforce.

So there is no single official figure for “how many people teach 16 to 18 year olds in England”, and the two sets of numbers cannot be added together to make one. Our Workforce Explorer keeps them in separate tabs for exactly this reason.

The boundary is not perfectly clean. DfE’s FE workforce collection also picks up 16 to 19 academies and free schools, which sit close to the school system in other respects. If a precise institutional split matters for your purposes, check the coverage notes on the specific release rather than relying on the general rule.

Sixth-form colleges pay much more like schools

On pay, sixth-form colleges have far more in common with schools than with general FE colleges: a median of roughly £49,700 against about £37,600 in general FE. They are also a small part of the college sector – in the pension records covering colleges, around 9% of teachers work in sixth-form colleges and about 91% in general FE colleges.

📊 Compare schools and colleges side by side