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?

Unless there were problems already , we would never put someone into capability for not meeting their targets .

I am not the only one who has been told this. It is written into the policy that has been adopted by the school.

If it looks like I'm not meeting my targets at my mid year review I will be put on capabilty then.

I am a good teacher with principles.

I am not saying that it isn't happening. But unless their are previous concerns it seems wrong to me. It also discouraged genuinely ambitious targets that come from the member of staff, which are therefore meaningful .

So....do we think in a football team all players should be paid the same? They are not are they? All players are paid differently. How are they judged then. Player A might have scored most goals, but he did so because Player B and C set them up for him. They might have Ferguson as manager, while another team might have Moyes. How much is that about the manager therefore and how much about the team. How is the defender or the centre half judged when they don't really get involved in scoring the goals and the lack of goals scored against the team might be about how rubbish the opposition is, not about how good they are. The answer if you asked anyone who were the good players, would be "because you can tell". It's the same in schools or indeed any other environment. A good headteacher knows who is delivering despite the handicaps of a particular cohort or special circumstances of individual children. They are the ones who set the financial rewards and assess meeting targets. Sure there will be some headteachers who use it to manage out those whose face doesn't fit, but that is going to be a small number in the overall context of things. It is worth it to pull up the lazy teachers, the ones who come in and just collect their paychecks. I have seen many of those over the years. The really good teachers and the ones who try hard really do have nothing to fear from a PRP system.

madasabox
If footballers balls it up, nobody's children have their life chances blighted.

If education stuffs up during your year 11
(as is currently happening to my daughter)
her options for the rest of her life might be impacted.

In a school with only 5 teachers, where are your benchmarks?
How do you measure when the standard deviation of tiny cohort changes can account for 20% of marks differences?

But teachers aren't all paid the same

After 6 years, automatic pay increments cease and you are at the top of the main pay scale. You can boost your salary by applying for a position of responsibility such as deputy or head of year or department, or by applying to go onto the upper pay scale, which the head will only approve if you have demonstrated you meet the criteria - I had to fill out a massive lever arch ring binder of evidence to progress to the upper pay scale.

redpipe, that's why PRP should reflect behaviours as well as outcomes (the "how" and the "what"): so that eg delivery by bullying behaviour isn't unduly rewarded and eg low results but otherwise effective delivery is.

My work is pretty intangible, and I don't particularly like PRP either. But I think the civil service - and teaching, and many other bits of the public sector - has to accept that our historically awful track record of managing poor performance really undermines arguments against it.

Madasabox

"The answer if you asked anyone who were the good players, would be "because you can tell"."

that really is an answer based on BS. Try taking that as an argument to an employment tribunal, it isn't going to work.

Families

How do you define bullying behaviour by a teacher that gets the required results?

Ok boney because the head knows the context of the achievement or lack of achievement of his staff in the same way a football manager knows his. He then applies that to a variety of metrics including grades, but also including progress and effort and a number of other things and arrives at a judgement. But if he wasn't in a tribunal, but was just talking to other HTs he would not talk about that he would say "x is a talented teacher" in the same way a football manager would say "x is great footballer".

In other industries if one fails to meet one's objectives then one is placed on a similar process to capability or sacked.

Madasabox
In other industries if one fails to meet one's objectives then one is placed on a similar process to capability or sacked.

But in other industries, ones targets are not entirely reliant on a factor outside your control : the genetic and social makeup of the incoming cohort.

eg a school that half way through the year has a traveller camp influx of children who skew all of the results for the classes they are in .

or a school where mid term the local army regiment changes so half the children leave - making all value added data worthless

or a school next to a free school that is judged "dysfunctional" so gets a sudden influx of pupils with rather poor core skills

Madasabox

That is a whole different answer to "because I can tell"

boney if you're teaching a class plus acting as SENCO for the school then in my mind you should obviously be getting more than someone who is a class teacher with no additional responsibilities or a SENCO with no teaching responsibilities. If you're dedicated SENCO with no teaching for a school with 1000 pupils and co-ordinating/line managing other specialist staff then that's more work than being dedicated SENCO with no teaching in a school of 100 (although I've never known a school that small have someone just doing the job of SENCO even very PT).

This is why posts need to be pay banded, not teachers themselves which is what PRP is effectively trying to do. It's looking at what that job is worth, not that individual teacher.

To answer the thread title before reading thread, I'd say the objection could be due to an unclear definition of what 'performance' is measured and how that performance relates to the values of the individual.

Is performance measured by no. of sick days taken, no. of holidays worked, level of achievement of the top/bottom half of the class regardless/in spite of the children's baseline scores, no. of lunch clubs run, attitude/support/compliance towards the competent/incompetent HT etc etc etc?

'How do you define 'success' in education? If you can't do that fairly, you can't connect pay to performance'

I don't see why not. In most other industries performance related pay can be pretty subjective.

I'm not saying it is fair at all, but it is the way of the world pretty much everywhere else.

Nom, a post like SENCO will have a TLR attached which is worth an additional sum of money on top of your teaching wage.

The TLR for being Head of Maths is worth more than the TLR for being Head of a non-core department. The money is attached to the post and not the teacher, so if the head of maths steps down, they lose the TLR.

You can get banded TLRs for various responsibilities. This is how it already works.

'And that is likely to make schools less likely to want to deal with children who don't look well in statistics: children with behavioural problems, children with SEN, children with difficulty home circumstances or simply children who miss a lot of school through health issues.'

Schools already don't want these children ime. Not sure performance related pay would make the slightest difference here. Though collecting data for these groups properly would highlight how badly most are being failed and then an action plan could be put in place.

NomDe

But the posts are already pay banded.

StarlightMcKenzie

So the Head of department gives themselves a mid range class (C/D boarderline) by value added they can (almost/generally) guarantee themselves a good value added each year, where as the class teacher gets top set (mainly A*/As) almost no chance of a good value added. (if that is what you are going to measure the PRP on).

It depends on what you are going to define success as
A*/A
A*-C
Value added
Number of grades moved since KS2

'I think it's the definition of performance that is the issue. It can only easily be measured by hard end points- exams passed/levels achieved etc ( and with the abolition of NC levels who defines achievement?)'

This is just not true and very rigid thinking.

I don't really know why teachers are against prp but suspect it is more to do with suspicion of pretty much every change that is proposed as generally they seem to make their working conditions worse and harder.

However, having experienced 5 SENCOs completely unable to write a SMART IEP I suspect that some of it is also to do with teachers not being experienced, trained or knowledgeable about how to capture, measure and use data, particularly for less concrete attainment, and are many teachers generally unable to link input to output.

Boney, but why would you define performance on grades? That could perhaps be a start but nonsensical to be the whole story?

Don't HTs get to set the salaries and performance levels? And if so, aren't most of them teachers with the same values and beliefs that their staff hold?

If I were a HT I wouldn't be assessing performance on grades alone. What makes you think others would?

I am a teacher a lot of the work I do is to support children with ASD and EBD to be able to stay at school, and to provide teachers who work with them the tools to do so. I have worked with one child with ASD for 6 years now and he has gone from being able to stay at school for an hour as he/the school couldn't cope to being there full time and an integrated full member of the class. To me that is success not the staying in school bit although that's fantastic the real integration. That's so difficult to measure.

Exactly my point. HOW is it impossible to measure a child with ASD not being in a classroom at all, to being fully integrated?

Personally I would want measures of engagement and evidence of that too, but the simple figures would show one hour a week in classroom at the beginning of the year and 6 hours a week in the classroom at the end. Blimmin EASY to measure is it not?

But in a lot of primaries in particular doesn't actually work like that, or at least it didn't before I fled the country.... People scrabble to keep whatever they're on - a previous colleague went from a job with a very heavy workload and a lot of responsibility at county level to teaching Y1 with nothing else, and stayed theoretically at the same level and didn't want to lose her nice pay packet The way TLR is worked out and what counts or doesn't us also unnecessarily complicated. Some things demand a huge amount of time but are remunerated with a pittance. It there's a one size fits all approach to how much our example SENCO would get.

Giving up the UPS or any additional TLR seems ridiculously complicated, and teachers seem to expect their prior role to be taken into account when working out the pay for their new one. How many corporations do you know who would let you drop from Marketing Director to receptionist and keep the same pay?

Also measure the engagement of the teachers with the tools and strategies you have given. How well they worked in terms of teacher time, student engagement. How effective they were. When and how you changed strategies in line with the student's development.

How that impacted on the child's progress. What their baseline rates of attention, engagement, attendance was. What the teachers baseline for time spent sorting out the child's difficulties compared with during and after intervention. What your role was within that. How you know it was your role that changed the outcome for the child.

All data. All measurable. All 'performance'.

OUt of interest, which hour in the day do you propose is given up for all this extra assessment and target setting?