Managing a school budget requires careful planning and a clear understanding of every cost involved in supporting your classrooms. One of the most visible changes introduced recently is the published cap on supplier fees for recruitment agencies. These headline numbers often draw immediate attention from finance teams and business managers who are reviewing their supply staff spend.
When you look at the buyer’s guide or website, you will see specific limits placed on how much an agency can charge for its services. These changes are designed to support you by making costs transparent and more manageable. By understanding exactly how these numbers breakdown, you can make highly informed decisions that benefit your students and your operational efficiency.
This blog explains what these caps actually are, what they cover, and what they leave out. We will guide you through interpreting these limits when reviewing your school or trust spend, ensuring you have the knowledge needed to build strong, cost-effective partnerships with your staffing providers.
The fee caps are agreed upon as part of the framework to protect school budgets. They limit the maximum daily fee a supplier can charge your school, which sits on top of the worker’s actual pay and their associated employment costs.
The published limits for the framework are up to £45 per day for STEM teachers, £40 for non-STEM teachers, and up to £38 per day for education support staff such as Teaching Assistants and Cover Supervisors. Caps vary per role and can vary between suppliers. You can find Engage’s fees on the supplier website, or we can talk you through them on a call.
This is where the conversation becomes highly useful for school leaders, because the caps only relate to one specific part of the total cost of a supply booking. A typical day’s invoice for a supply teacher under the framework breaks down into three distinct components.
This first component is what the supply worker actually earns for their day in the classroom. It varies based on the specific role, your location, the educator’s qualifications, and the rate the supplier and worker have mutually agreed upon. The framework does not cap or set this amount, because it remains an agreement between the supplier and the worker in line with employment law.
These are the necessary on-costs the supplier incurs as the worker’s employer. They include employer national insurance contributions, pension contributions where applicable, holiday pay accrual, and similar statutory employment costs. The framework does not cap these costs because they are determined by standard HMRC rates and pension legislation.
This is the supplier’s fee, representing what the agency charges for sourcing, vetting, paying, managing and maintaining support standards and administering the worker. This is the exact figure that the framework caps per day for teachers and support staff. When you see the daily fee in the agency selection tool, that figure represents this third component only.
Splitting the cost into these three categories is a deliberate and helpful choice. Before this system existed, schools often saw a single daily total charge rate from an agency and had no visibility of what was inside it. That lack of clarity made it almost impossible to compare suppliers properly, or to know whether a higher rate reflected better worker pay or simply a higher supplier fees.
By separating the worker pay, the on-costs, and the supplier fee, the framework ensures you can see exactly where your budget is going. This supportive model ensures that suppliers compete fairly on their fees rather than hiding behind opaque pricing structures.
If you are a school business manager or trust finance officer looking at supply spend, you need to use these cap figures sensibly.
You should avoid comparing gross daily rates against the cap. If your supplier currently charges £180 per day for a supply teacher, that £180 is the total combined cost of pay, on-costs, and fees. The supplier’s fee within that £180 might be £35, £45, or higher, meaning you need to ask for the breakdown to truly know.
You should definitely ask for an open-book breakdown from your providers. Suppliers are required to be transparent about what they charge. You can ask any supplier to break down a sample invoice into worker pay, on-costs, and their fee. You can then easily compare the fee component against the cap.
To make this completely clear, think about a supply teacher booked for a single day at a local primary school. The supplier’s fee in the tool shows £40 per day,
The actual invoice the school receives might look something like this:
In that simple example, the school has full visibility of what the worker earned, what the supplier paid to HMRC, and what the agency took as its fee. That transparency is the core principle this system is built on, keeping you fully informed and in control.
For most schools and trusts, the introduction of these fee caps is unlikely to produce a dramatic change in total supply costs. Worker pay and on-costs typically make up the vast majority of the total invoice and remain completely unaffected by the caps.
Where the caps truly matter is in providing a clear, public reference point against which supplier fees can be compared and challenged. Schools that understand what they are paying are in a much stronger position than schools that do not. The fee caps are simply one of the supportive tools you have to get there.
We are proud to be a named supplier on Government Commercial Agency’s (GCA) RM6376 framework, and we always prioritise complete transparency in our billing.
If you would like to walk through a worked example of your own supply spend, broken down clearly into worker pay, on-costs, and supplier fees, we would be incredibly happy to do that on a call. It is often the quickest way to see exactly what your current arrangements look like under this helpful transparency model.
We want to empower you with the data insights you need to drive operational efficiency across your entire school. Reach out to our friendly team today to book your spend breakdown call and see how we can support your ongoing success.
Engage Education has been named as a supplier on Government Commercial Agency’s (GCA) RM6376 Supply Teachers and Education Recruitment framework, Lot 1: Teachers and Education Recruitment. The framework runs from the 30th of April 2026 to the 29th of April 2029.
Government Commercial Agency (GCA) is the UK’s central commercial and procurement organisation, connecting public and private sectors to achieve the best outcomes for the UK and its citizens. GCA uses its commercial expertise to create a simpler procurement experience that redirects valuable resources into essential public services, creating value for the nation.
Book a 15-minute GCA framework consultation to see what this means for your school or trust.
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