To not understand why teachers should object to performance related pay?

[Dolcelatte]

After all, it happens in most other sectors, so why should teachers be any different. I am not trying to be controversial and there will undoubtedly be others with a better understanding of the issues. However, I don't understand the objections in principle. Why shouldn't remuneration be dependent upon performance?

"Please explain how I will be assessed. All the kids I teach have been severely abused or neglected. A lot have targets of A from their KS2 results, but I will feel a huge sense of achievement if they get a C. I presume this means I will never get a pay rise."*

If you feel that way I would suggest there has been very poor communication in your school about this.

Do you not have performance appraisals currently?

Sorry messed up bolding

Check out the toolkit on the Education Endowment Foundation - very easy to navigate and interesting. Performance related pay is not, on plentiful evidence, an effective way of raising educational attainment.

For those saying that it's easy to spot a poor teacher regardless of their results, it's not. It's very subjective.

Imagine there is a teacher who barks orders at the kids, never involves them in conversation and sticks rigidly to the timetable. The children are subdued in lessons and do almost all their work in absolute silence. These children are 5 and 6 years old, and almost all the parents complain. Except little Johnny's mum. Little Johnny has ASD and is thriving in the orderly classroom, making much more progress than in the previous year.

Ok, this is a made up, extreme example. But the reality is, it would be far too easy to manipulate a judgement on teachers' performance. The school budget is looking a bit tight this year, and all of a sudden the teachers are underpeforming and don't deserve a pay rise. Maybe the teacher isn't adequately scaffoldi children's learning (even though the most recent INSET day was on encouraging independence in children's work). Maybe the lessons aren't pitched high enough (even though there has been a lot of pressure put on teachers by SMT to consolidate children's learning before moving on).

And as everyone else has explained, if you've got a bottom set or several EAL students who don't know much English vs. a teacher who has top set predicted all A - who do you think will move up the pay scale!?

The teacher whose children have made the most progress (and not necessarily in grade/level terms) given their starting point.*

The HT or HofD knows the children as well as the teachers. The amount of progress required to meet your targets would be negotiated knowing the children and their weaknesses and strengths. The targets for PRP are supposed to be relevant to the teacher not a blanket 'everybody will improve by 2 sub levels or you have failed'. That isn't how it works in practice at all.

I still don't understand why teachers seem to think that HT are not able to assess their teaching capabilities. Do you think they aren't trained to do just that? They do it all the time. They can monitor a lesson in a class room and know which teachers have planned properly, are able to differentiate whilst teaching, are able to adjust a plan whilst thinking of on their feet and teaching if the situation warrants it, etc, etc. HT are all teachers too. They should know good teaching when they see it. That is what they are paid and trained to do. If teachers don't think the HT is up to the job and they haven't been appraised properly take it to the governors. They should have a sub committee able to deal with complaints.

I my previous career by bonus often relied on people I would never meet buying something, or people working beneath me, whom I may only briefly meet, managing to sell something. It is quite rare that your performance is not affected by someone else, in any sector.

So people buying things they want or need, and people who have been selected by your company through recruitment and training and who can be sacked.

Totally different situation to schools.

Not I say schools, not education.

Schools have to take every pupil they have room for and can't just get rid if they don't like what they have been sent.

It is a different scenario but you do kit have direct control over your outcomes in the private sector either.

I could not control the private lives of my team and wider workforce, I could not control the finances of my customers. I don't hand pick the customers .

As a manager in education my PRP will be affected by my team , whom my school have appointed .

It concerns me how fatalistic people are about education talking as if progress is an uncontrollable accident .

I'd be concerned if our head was doing the appraisals for this. He very much has his favourites and they aren't necessarily the most hard-working or best teachers either.

PRP sounds good in theory. In practice, a teacher's performance is affected significantly by the cohort of pupils they teach. You can't expect the same performance year-on-year because each cohort has a different mix of abilities.

You can't expect the same value added either, because despite government insisting it should, SEN children do not make progress at the same rate as NT children, UNLESS something significant is done about the cause of their SEN. So a child who has an eye operation which dramatically improves their sight, or who who is given coloured overlays/glasses and extra teaching for their dyslexia will improve in line with (or temporarily faster than) their peers. Then there are the children whose parents are currently splitting up, who have ill relatives, child protection concerns etc. They aren't going to be concentrating very well in school, so won't make as good a level of progress.

A whole cohort's progress can also be adversely affected by one very disruptive child. I have seen this happen. In those cases, the grade of the teacher's lesson observations and the rate of progress their class makes, will both be affected, despite the teacher doing all they can for their class and that child. Often these are children who later on end up either excluded or no longer in mainstream education.

Now the way things are with PRP now, if you don't meet your targets, there's talk of being put on capability. So you don't get a pay rise because this year's cohort isn't as good as last year's, AND you get put through all the stress of capability, when you're the same teacher you are last year, with the same skills that they were perfectly happy with then! Every teacher who teaches that cohort will suffer the same. How is that fair?

Then there are curriculum changes. So now your children don't get the grades they need for your pay to go up (and for you to stay out of capability) because Gove changed the goal posts half way through the exam syllabus. Again, how is that fair?

So glad I'm out of it!

Cohorts make a huge difference, especially in small primaries.

DD1s group are nice, but a bit confidence free - several L4s that could have been L5.
Ofsted got the hump and downgraded good to satisfactory.

DD2's lot, bunch of bright cocky confident graduate professionals DCs. Dead cert L5 (and I suspect a few maths L6 although those weren't made public)

Ofsted gives the school back it's good.

Same HT, same class teacher and many of the same past teachers. Very different DCs with equally nice, but differently pushy parents.

Ok my two clearly had the same parents, but DD1 didn't learn to read until 4 months before her SATs, DD2 was top of the class for literacy from Y1 onwards.

As an aside, if we are going to have (ridiculous) performance related pay, I want it PROPERLY. I want a £2000 bonus when my class exceed expectations. I would really enjoy £10,000 when I persuade a new family to join the school. Hell, I would not say no to a million pound bonus if my school hit the top of the league tables.

Hope Gove's got deep pockets.

How on gods green earth do you decide what to pay their nice class teacher.

As a parent I know she deserved as much credit for the lower performing cohort as the second one because of the time she spent on ensuring DD1 wasn't bullied and encouraging the boy responsible to succeed despite his family and the hours she put into musical performances, always.

If teachers don't think the HT is up to the job and they haven't been appraised properly take it to the governors. They should have a sub committee able to deal with complaints.

It's not actually that common to be observed by the head, more likely another member of SLT. And when my department last was observed, there were so many complaints about the judgements that it was declared that outcomes of observations were not up for discussion and could not be disputed.

I think I've been observed twice by the head in 8 years of teaching.

And Ofsted are also trained to observe, but there was a long thread on the TES forum of ridiculous comments made by Ofsted.

community.tes.co.uk/tes_opinion/f/31/t/568049.aspx is worth a read.

Retropear, would your DP be given the harder projects on purpose to try and push them out and/or purposely pay them less, for ulterior motives by the boss? Why have a system that is dependent on the decency of those enforcing it? It will and does happen. Why try to foist an already unfair system from the private to the public sector? Want to spread the misery? Or do what is best for the children being taught? There have been many studies proving PRP does not produce more productive workers and I will find them for you if you need me to.

If teachers don't think the HT is up to the job and they haven't been appraised properly take it to the governors. They should have a sub committee able to deal with complaints. and if you don't think Governors won't support the Head, you are sadly misguided. My last Head, when converting to an Academy, sacked three of the Governors who disagreed with him and didn't appoint any to replace them. Upshot? Mass exodus of some pretty excellent teachers. Lo and behold? That particular Grammar school is no longer number one in that borough...

can we have performance related pay for the government first?
how are they going to measure that?

I see everyone's concerns about this, I really do. If applied as a blunt tool in the way some of you are describing then yes, it's not going to be fair.

However, that is not the only way.

At my (primary) school this year, we have been trialling a new procedure for performance management. It is not in any way perfect and is being reviewed after the PM reviews next week.

It revolves around being scored for various things throughout the year - so for every book trawl, lesson observation, learning walk...etc a score is given, which is then turned Into a percentage.

We also go through the teacher standards and score ourselves on them using the 4 Ofsted categories. They give us a percentage too.

We also get scored for things like how many 'extras' we do. How we lead a particular subject, how many extra curricular things we do...etc.

At the end of the year, the scores are given an appropriate weighting (which gives lesson observations less weighting than book and planning scrutinies, for instance) and a final percentage is reached. This is then judged against your career stage expectation (so an NQT would e expected to get 75% say, where a senior leader would need more like 90%) This determines whether you are on track.

There are also negotiated PM targets as before, but these are based on points progress- so you look at the individual class and work out what realistically could be expected of that particular group of children in a specific subject. You can always argue at that point that a certain number of Children are unlikely to make more than x amount of progress because of y and that is taken into account.

The Head argues that this system, due to looking at the 'whole' teacher, gives a fairer picture. It's not solely progress related. It recognises that some teachers are better at some elements than others.

I will come back and tell you whether it has worked next week! It is a bit complicated and I do feel as though I'm spending more time being marked and monitored myself than the children are.

PRP in the private sector is usually a way to encourage sucking up.
It does not work there either
Bankers bonuses did not improve performance, they just skewed it towards the measurable targets

Teachers should not be graded according to how many extra curricular activities they do. I would contact my union if that were the case.

PS
At my crammer, the staff were paid nearly half their salary as a bonus based on our grades
but it was perfectly open - we knew how much they would get for each A : then again we were 17 and up and the groups were of no more than 8 and the place was eye wateringly expensive.

Well it's described as how much you 'contribute to the wider life of the school', which means whether you attend family mass on Sunday (Catholic School) or whether you do extra things - not necessarily after school, but things that are outside your immediate remit. I think.

Talkinpeace

How did those that had no "A" grade students at the start of the year take the news?

BigBoobied most HTs have not been trained to observe and judge, actually. And in practice you are observed most by your line manager who has a big teaching commitment and has certainly had no training. On top of that, it is a very subjective thing - I have a HT who thinks the only correct way to do things is the HTs way. I teach very differently, but exceed FFT targets. Now what? I am judged a bit crap by HT, but my results are good...
Aris I begin to wonder whether you are actually a teacher in the UK. I don't like to doubt people, but nothing you write on any education thread bears any resemblance to anything I have experienced in 24 years and 6 different secondary schools. Morale is rock bottom, by the way - not just in my schools, but with all teacher friends (overwhelmingly secondary).

We are also trying to find a way of making PRP work for us and are discussing something similar to lifeissweet.

I don't quite know what to say to that cardibach, a very polite troll accusation. I don't know many teachers who are as depressed and overworked as other teachers on here. But I suspect that if you are generally a very positive person you tend to attract and spend time with other people who are the same way.

I also seem to work far less than most teachers on MN, as do most of the teachers I know, maybe that is why our morale is higher.