We need to get rid of performance-related pay for teachers

Oh and the A in SMART target stands for achievable and not agreed

It can stand for either. At our school is stands for agreed. "Realistic" covers the achievability side of things.

ruby teachers do not get an inflationry pay rise. We got 1% this year

Yes, I know. I meant "inflationary" in the linked-to-inflation, and goes up every year sense of the word.

I work in the university sector and our annual rises are s*it too, but they're still better than I was getting when I worked for an IT Consultancy that was beholden to shareholders. There they used to rank everyone in order by "performance" and only award pay increases to the top x%, or else they would give 'bonuses' instead because that didn't commit them to paying out the same amount the following year. I was part-time so you can probably guess I didn't rank too highly on the list, despite meeting all my objectives! So don't assume all other graduate professions are better paid, despite what the teaching unions might claim it's a tough market out there in the private sector.

At the end of the day, if teachers feel they are unfairly paid then they will leave and work for another school or sector instead. However schools need a mechanism to retain the best staff, and they also need a mechanism to encourage the dead wood to drift off.

admission I get your point but progression though threshold was always supposed to be based on competence. If that wasn't happening, that was the fault of the schools and not the pay award system.

A teacher only automatically progressed through to M6. Some teachers with relevant industrial experience entered the profession on M3 so only really benefitted from 3 years' worth of automatic progression anyway.

What is M6 worth anyway - £32,000? How does that compare to, say, an IT graduate with 6 years' experience or an accountant? It's hardly an outrageously large salary.

Oh and the A in SMART target stands for achievable and not agreed. Mind you, neither are often applicable to the targets set for teachers to achieve for their pay progression.

I think you need to recognise performance and that can be done in many ways over and above targets about attainment. As Rancidoldhag says it is clear to most who are the good and the poor teachers anyway, so not a great problem. PP based solely on attainment targets is not acceptable.
What concerns me is the idea that for many years in the past, all teachers got both a raise up the scale and also inflation rise (pre 2001) which meant that many very poor teachers were being paid way more than they should have been and nobody could stop it happening. This can not be repeated.

Plus, performance related pay is not quite as 'objective' as organisations like to pretend. There is always some 'wriggle room' put into the objectives and professional competencies that means that pay progression can be awarded despite failing to fully meet numerical objectives or denied despite meeting them for 'reasons' that suit the manager. Anyone who argues that it's a level playing field is deluded.

ruby teachers do not get an inflationry pay rise. We got 1% this year (been the same for a few years now). Inflation is around 3% so another real terms cut. Wage growth in all sectors is poor at the moment but your post makes out that teachers pay is keeping up with inflation. It isn't and it's worrying that you think this as a governer.

I can see the benefits and pitfalls in both automatic pay progression and performance-related pay progression.

With automatic progression you can very easily end up with the situation where members of staff end up 'automatically' hitting the top of the pay scale with no real demonstration of increased competence. Some schools used to see threshold as a sort of formality that everyone just went through after M6.

On the other hand, automatic pay progression was seen as a way to mitigate the fact that starting salaries for teachers was pretty shite compared to other graduate professions - particularly those in shortage subjects.

Performance-related pay, on the other hand, is very flawed. It leads to an over-emphasis on the 'measurable' targets and leads to the tick-box culture we now find ourselves as a society ruled by where CEOs award themselves double and triple digit pay rises based on achievement of objectives while everyone around them knows the organisation is going to shit.

It seems that teaching now has the worst of both worlds - shit starting salaries that you cannot get away from unless a great deal of your energy is focused on the hitting of numerical targets and objectives and to hell with everything else.

When the public sector is on a major pay-freeze, then there is no annual uplift, but teachers can still get pay rises via PRP. When there is the annual uplift, they can receive both that and PRP. It's a good deal compared to other sectors.

Deciding what counts as sufficient performance for eligibility isn't really harder for teachers than it is for sag surgeons and merits awards - survival rate isn't the be-all-and-end all, and systems can and do come with all sorts of roles.

After all, I've never met a teacher who doesn't know which of there colleagues is exceptional, who are the vast majority who are competent and committed, and which are the few who you woukdn't trust to organise a piss-up in a brewery. Performance matrices should encapsulate exactly that.

I disagree noble. Performance related pay is common in most other professional sectors. It's difficult to assess performance there too, but if done sensibly and fairly it's still effective.

In the school where I'm a governor pay progression is decided by setting staff SMART (specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, timebound) objectives. If they meet their objectives they progress. If they don't then they don't. Simples. The vast majority of staff meet their objectives, so they progress.

It's also worth mentioning that teachers do get a basic inflationary rise. The PRP element is on top of that. This may be obvious to anyone working in the public sector, but less so to people in the private sector where zero pay rise does what it says on the tin. (I've worked for a firm where I got zero pay rise for 2 successive years - that would never happen in the public sector).

Agree absolutely.

I can see the pitfalls but it's the norm in many other jobs where it also can't be objectively measured.

None, you're right.