What has changed
The Supply Teachers and Education Recruitment framework, reference RM6376, went live in May 2026. It is run by the Government Commercial Agency and provides a pre-negotiated route for schools and trusts to buy agency supply staff.
When the Academy Trust Handbook is published in September 2026, it will require trusts to use the framework for supply staffing unless they have an alternative compliant arrangement with rates that do not exceed those available through it.
The requirement sits at trust level, with spend aggregated across the schools in a trust. The published guidance does not set out an equivalent mandatory requirement for maintained schools.
The caps are on agency fees, not teacher pay
This is the part most likely to be reported incorrectly. The framework caps the maximum daily supplier fee by role: £55 for senior roles, £45 for STEM teachers, £40 for non-STEM teachers, £38 for SEND educational support staff, £36 for non-SEND support and facilities, £34 for other roles and £32 for admin and clerical.
DfE is explicit that the cap is on the supplier fee, not on what supply workers are paid. A £45 STEM cap does not mean a physics supply teacher earns £45 a day. It means the agency may add up to £45 on top of whatever the worker is paid.
The distinction matters commercially as well as editorially: capping the margin changes agency economics without directly setting worker pay.
Why it is being done
The stated context is scale. Schools across England spend approximately around £1.4 billion a year on agency supply staff. Centralising procurement and capping margins is intended to reduce what schools pay for the same cover.
Whether it does so is an empirical question that the school finance data will answer over the next few years, through the agency supply lines in DfE's expenditure collections. Any early claim in either direction would be running ahead of the evidence.
What school leaders should check
Trusts with existing supply arrangements need to establish whether those arrangements are compliant and whether their rates exceed the framework's. That is a rates comparison, not simply a question of which agency is used.
Because the requirement aggregates spend at trust level, trusts with devolved school-level purchasing may find their position differs from what any individual school would conclude on its own.
Procurement rules change. Work from the current Academy Trust Handbook and the Government Commercial Agency listing rather than from summaries, including this one.