To think keeping teachers' pay low shouldn't be hailed as a positive in an OFSTED report?

[thinkingmakesitso]

I am looking for a new job and always check the OFSTED report of any schools I consider, though I obviously don't take it as gospel and would do other research as well - I think I know how to 'read' them, iyswim.

Anyway, one I saw last night has left me so angry. The school is good and all aspects of teachers' work are praised. The school takes in pupils who are well below average at KS3, so the achievements made are all the more hard won. It then goes on to praise the fact that teachers have a 'score card' to monitor their performance, and praises the fact that performance management is rigorous and pay progression only takes place in exceptional circumstances.

AIBU to think this is no way to treat professionals - a 'score card' ffs? I am at the top of the upper pay spine anyway, so would not be eligible for pay progression, but no way am I carrying a score card, and I would fear my pay being put down due to factors beyond my control. How is a school which, reading between the lines, and knowing the area as I do, needs to attract excellent teachers to do so if that is how they treat their staff? Surely they should be doing all they can to attract staff? Well, they are- this isn't mentioned on TES, of course, but who on earth would want to go there once they know about it?

Why are teachers not valued by this government? Well, I know the answer, but just wanted to rant. .

Appraisals aren't based on how you want to profess. Appraisals are on how well you are achieving what you are hired to do. Where you want to progress to is something I would expect to be discussed if you are constantly out performing your targets.

AnthonyBlanche
Independent schools quite often pay more than state. But that comes with a pretty substantial additional set of responsibilities. Not all teachers stick around in the independents either due to the workload but I suspect the retention rate of individual organisations is high.

And I would argue that that's ridiculous too. Probation officers are measured on the compliance of their service users, drug workers are measured on the success rate of their clients, my friend is a psychologist and is measured on how many of her clients have improved mental health.

How do you measure these things? And how do you decide what the important measurable things even are?

I am not bleating about poor teachers, I think the same idiocy is rife across the board. NO professional should be measured on arbitrary, unmeasurable targets. Not just teachers.

I assume that a school, which is after all supposed to be an organisation which knows more about teaching than I do, knows how to measure performance.

This is bollocks. Even Ofsted have scrapped their grading of individual teachers because they realised their assessments were crap.

You end up with payment by results. Which is crap, because it's not teachers sitting the exam.

I teach maths. Maths is a setted subject. Each time we do a test I look at results and decide whether to move students up or down out of my set. If I am to be paid by results, where is the incentive to move my good students up a set, and to not move my feckless students down a set? The teacher who gets timetabled with bottom set is effectively giving up their pay rise for that year.

And my God, the time involved in all of this is ridiculous. The time spent monitoring colleagues and being monitored and providing evidence for monitoring and getting feedback from monitoring. It's time that should be spent improving practice, being trained, planning...etc. I want my Head Teacher to be looking at the big picture, not micro-managing staff.

If I genuinely thought that the scores were helpful, reflective of our work and fair then there would be no complaints. They are not any of these things.

Oh, and if you were Head of Department, would you timetable yourself with bottom set, or would you give yourself cushy top sets who would guarantee you a pay rise?

The counter argument is that if there is no monitoring what stands between the children and an ineffectual teacher?

Of course there's bloody monitoring. There was monitoring and performance management all along.

The counter argument is that if there is no monitoring what stands between the children and an ineffectual teacher?

Monitoring is completely different from performance related pay. Every teacher will be observed by their line manager and given feedback and targets.

No one would argue for no monitoring. We don't want 'bad' teachers getting away with coasting either.

The difficulty is that no one can agree on what good performance looks like and how it should be measured. The focus, criteria and measures are different every year.

If someone could decide on what makes a good teacher and stick with it, that would help.

So you have monitoring. And you have individual feedback and targets.

But this is entirely separate to pay discussions? Or does it feed in?

Oh, and if you were Head of Department, would you timetable yourself with bottom set, or would you give yourself cushy top sets who would guarantee you a pay rise?

Exactly, Noble, and the type of situation we are in with our HoD now. He has a second set Y11 and I have the top set. We made some moves as a department so I moved down 2 pupils to him. After bragging all year about how his were working at As, he then said he had no one to move up to me . Eventually, he moved up one lad who had failed to complete all the CAs done at that point . Meanwhile, HoD also moved down his worst pupils to set 3 - all with incomplete CAs etc. He makes endless snide comments about the two I moved down, despite the fact that I had no choice as they were the only 2 I had below target on CAs.

This ridiculous system does nothing to protect staff and pupils from people like him, - we focus on all these numbers etc that he can manipulate, while the whole picture is ignored because it is not easily measurable.

To move from main pay scale to upper pay scale there are a set of criteria that you must meet, so it filters in on that instance.

I work in a school for boys with social, emotional and mental health difficulties (what used to be EBD). Nearly all have been permanently excluded from mainstream education and come from very chaotic homes. I love my job and my school but these boys hardly ever make their academic targets (they have often managed to hold it together at primary school to get decent SATs levels but their issues really kick in during the teenage years).
These children have seen and experienced domestic violence, drug taking in their home, incarceration of parents/siblings, neglect and abuse, police raids and so on. I cannot control any of this.

Luckily my school knows what our students' lives are like but since becoming an academy the pressure on progress is growing. With performance related pay who is ever going to choose to work with these complicated, damaged, explosive but ultimately wonderful students?

MotherKat, you talk about 6 months paid sick leave as if it's something that everyone took every year. I probably had about 3 weeks total in 14 years of my last job, including 8 days when I'd fractured my elbow (I was a secretary and typing/writing/carrying piles of folders & documents would have been a problem) and a couple of days of flu (which lasted through the following Christmas holidays or it would have been more). My boss didn't even take his annual leave for most of his many years in local government, his only sick leave turned out to be due to terminal cancer.

The sense that private sector companies are entitled to exploit their employees makes me sick.

noblegiraffe, that's an excellent example of how performance related pay is unfair, doesn't work and might work against the interests of pupils. I can't see how it's going to encourage teachers to get the best out of any but the most academic.

Performance management has always been done. Performance related pay is new.

As an example, at the same school I am talking about - when I started there 8 years ago, a performance review would involve reviewing and setting 3 targets. One progress target for the class - or elements of the class who needed an extra push. One personal target - such as implementing a new behaviour management strategy and improvement noted in an observation and a professional target (such as taking on an additional project/responsibility/training course.) The conversation was informed by feedback from book scrutinies and 2 yearly lesson observations.

All fairly reasonable. If you met the targets, you progressed up the scale. If you were not meeting targets then you were given an interim target and had to meet that. Otherwise competence measures would come in. Does that not sound reasonable?

Since PRP has come in, the level and amount of monitoring has rocketed. We are monitored twice or three times a week and scored on things like 'how good your classroom walls look' Any opportunity to reduce your 'score' to allow a refusal to increase pay is taken. It feels like an exercise in beating us down, not actually improving things for the children.

I was a teacher for 12 years, I now work as an adviser for teachers. This is what is happening in teaching: teachers over the age of 50, particularly women are being pushed out through trumped up capability and bullying. These are teachers who have been consistently graded as good and outstanding for 20+ years. They are too expensive. Then there are new teachers who are under so much pressure to be perfect and achieve ridiculous data targets from the get go. Loads leave within the first 3 years.
Yes there are some underperforming teachers. But not in the quantities that are being pushed out or leaving. I know many outstanding colleagues that have left in the last few years, fed up of being graded according to plain data.

Schools judge teachers by data. No regard for the fact that teachers can't control everything, that sometimes a student will not achieve their target grade for no fault of the teacher. I have spoken to teachers who failed to make pay progression because they missed their target data by less than 1%.

Schools are financially in lots of trouble too. So they are getting rid of expensive experienced teachers and employing cheap, unqualified teachers. It is a crisis I the making.

Judging on data can be terribly unfair.

For example, my performance target a couple of years ago was to do with the 5 least able children in my year 1 class. All of them had to make more than 5 points progress for me to pass. That was NEVER going to happen.

Despite all of my efforts, 2 of them missed their target.

The rest of the class made really excellent progress.

In fact, they made such good progress that my phase leader came to thank me because her performance target was based on the percentage of progress across the whole phase - and my class brought up her averages quite nicely, thank you very much.

So she met her targets thanks to te efforts of me and my children, yet I 'failed' my own.

How is that in any way meaningful?

Very glad I'm not a science teacher anymore!

Would rather do anything than that!

Haddocks what you describe is pretty exactly the change that has taken place in every job over the last couple of decades. Going up the scales as a matter of course for employees who are doing the job to the standards required just stopped. Going up scale points became exceptional. Those underperforming would be put on performance management, salary not move even if there was a raise on the salary band for cost of living and ultimately let go.

I'm not saying it is a fantastic thing. It is reality when there is not enough money to do what used to happen.

Haddock that is indeed not meaningful. Measuring that impacts one person but benefits another is unfair.

Ignore it; they are now struggling so we'll all get more money soon anyway.

What happens in other jobs doesn't make it right.

And the starting salary for teachers is crap. Budgets for schools are tight.

Look at the current TV advert for teachers 'great teachers can earn up to £65k'

How many people will stay in teaching with their good degree given the extreme workload if they start at 22k and are stuck there because the school can't afford to pay them more so simply sets them targets they can't meet?

Payment by results.
Fine by me.

Sally so the teacher who has top set should get paid more than the one who has bottom set? That's fine by you?

What an utterly idiotic argument.

Their targets wouldn't be the same though noble.