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

[noblegiraffe]

We need to get rid of performance-related pay for teachers and reinstate automatic pay progression up the pay scale don't we?

1. Any attempts to measure teacher perfomance are flawed. Payment by results? Top set teachers are laughing, bottom set teachers crying. Payment by observation outcomes? We know these are subjective nonsense to the point that Ofsted have scrapped them. So what could be realistically used that would be fair?

2. In times of extreme budget restraint such as now, schools will be more likely to hold people on lower pay points for spurious reasons

3. Potential lack of pay progression could put off new entrants to teaching in a time of a severe teacher shortage

4. If the only realistic way to see your pay increase to reasonable levels is through promotion, then we will see teachers taking promoted posts without the relevant experience and before they are really ready

5. If you have been teaching for a full extra year, then that experience is valuable and should be rewarded even if it can't quite be quantified

Any objections?

I agree.

I don't think it's fair to have PRP that is based so much on the behaviour of other people and not in your control. I'd possibly agree that targets such as running a club etc could be rewarded, but again that's the teacher's effort, not the performance of how it turns out/attendance.

it's not that I object to the fact of teacher's being measured, exactly, but more that I don't think it is ultimately good for the pupils. I think it leads to a huge emphasis on exams and marks, so that lessons become nothing but preparing for exams and learning exactly what's on the syllabus and exactly how the mark scheme works, rather than a broader education. Everyone ends up stressed and under pressure, and it leads to all sorts of game playing about which exams to enter pupils for to gain the maximum marks for the school, etc, rather than what might be best for a student's education more generally. Clubs that are measured on % of pupils attending might end up becoming populist, and leaving no room for more niche subjects that might be very enriching, but not so superficially exciting and attractive. Schools end up being compared on too many measured in league tables, which again leads to games-playing with data of all sorts, trying to get the right statistics in any way possible, and this then leads to all sort of problems with admissions, catchments, popular schools, and so forth.

In short, I think you can't treat education in such a quantitative way, and that doing so is part of a much bigger picture of what is wrong; we need to change what we value about education.

Of course it is difficult, because there are good teacher and bad ones, and ones that will put no effort in if not incentivised in some way, and it is hard to know how to do that when what defines 'good' is so nebulous. But I think what is needed is a cultural shift generally, that values teaching, teachers, education in a broad sense, rather than just more pressure for result defined in very specific, quantitative ways.

What is M6 worth anyway - £32,000? How does that compare to, say, an IT graduate with 6 years' experience or an accountant

Normal "accountants", i.e. those who are workers rather than managers/partners, will be on similar wages outside the city firms, i.e. typically £25k-£35k) Managers (maybe 10 years experience i.e. equivalent to say department heads) will be on £40k-£50k. I've recently had a recruitment firm send me details of an experienced qualified accountant looking to relocate to my town with salary expectation of £27.5k. Outside the city firms, I'd say that accountant wages are very similar to teachers. I run my own very small practice and I earn about £50k (35 years experience) which I'd compare to being a headteacher after that length of experience, so actually quite a bit less (not to mention pension etc).

Why would teachers be any different from anyone else? Every job I’ve ever had has an element of performance related pay. The best get paid most. Seems right and proper.

Running a very small accountancy practice is not equivalent to the job of a secondary head. And headship is not just about experience anyway. Most teachers with that experience do not make (or seek) headship.

How do you measure which is the "best" teacher?

Just to say again. It is not PRP. It is performance related progression up a payscale. When you reach the top, no progression, however fabulous you are.

Kazzyhoward, thanks for the info. TBH, I live in a very wealthy part of the country where wages are really high (lots of tech firms), so I don't know what salaries are like elsewhere.

The problem for teachers is that that 'automatic' progression up to £32,000 has now gone. Many schools are in absolutely dire financial situations, and it's all too easy to put a halt on progression if targets aren't rigidly met.

Likewise, Heads know that teachers of certain subjects can more-or-less name their price and will simply go elsewhere if they are denied their progression each year. I doubt there are many physics teachers who don't go from, say, M3 to M4 automatically in a year. If they even suspect it could happen, they'll jump ship (or threaten to). It's a great game of call-my-bluff. Trust me, I've seen it happen with our former head of physics, who knew his targets were pretty much irrelevant as the head was never going to deny him his progression point despite missing his A level targets by a mile. How the hell is that contributing to raising standards.

Now I'm not for one second saying that a rigorous target setting and appraisal system is a bad thing. I'm also not saying that performance related pay is wholly a bad thing. I do think that shoe-horning performance related pay into the old rigid pay point system is somewhat problematic.

Your are right TheFallenMadonna.

I am on M6 but am part time and don't have tutor responsbilities. I don't want to go through threshold and would have difficulty justifying the application due to my position in the school.

So, no incentive to take on anything extra or go the extra mile. As long as I don't pass a 'floor' that puts me into capability territory, nothing changes.

Hardly inspiring 'performance related pay'.

No, but you can measure them by how much progress their students are making against their targets, or by whether a more than x% of their form-group are encouraged to do after-school activities, or by whether they contributed to the extra-curricular life of the school by running a club, whether they organised a school outing, or various other more reasonable measures.

What a lot of crap. Your first point (erroneously) assumes that the targets are fair and realistic, and also ignores things which happen in a child's home-life which affect their ability to hit targets.

As for basing a teacher's pay progression on how many of their pupils go to after-school activities... I don't even know where to begin with that.

Neither should teachers' pay progression be based on doing things which are outside their contracted hours.

To be fair, my DH's performance is also affected by factors beyond his control. The economy for a start.

If we want there to actually be enough teachers to teach our children, teaching needs to be a more attractive job. People are voting with their feet. You can compare the pay and conditions of teaching favourably or unfavourably with the private sector until the cows come home, but ultimately we need to have enough decent teachers in classrooms. And we don't.

we need to have enough decent teachers in classrooms. And we don't.

I sat in on all the interview lessons for all the applicants for the physics and chemistry jobs in our school last year. Every qualified applicant was interviewed. Every sample lesson was utter shit. I mean utter shit. None of the candidates was recruited. One was teaching from a 1970s textbook and using out-of-date technical words. One couldn't write chemical formulae correctly on the board.

All of them were currently working as teachers (albeit on supply) in local schools.

Of the last ten teachers to leave our department, five have left the UK state education sector completely. Only one of them has retired at a 'normal' age.

I don't think it's fair to have PRP that is based so much on the behaviour of other people and not in your control

If you're a teacher I hope they are in your control PickleFish, or at least certainly under your influence.

Your first point (erroneously) assumes that the targets are fair and realistic

They are fair and realistic in our school. And the vast majority of teachers meet them and get their pay progression.

As for basing a teacher's pay progression on how many of their pupils go to after-school activities... I don't even know where to begin with that

Well don't come and work at our school then. We have a rich extra-curricular offering and teachers encourage students in their form groups to make the most of it, rather than shrug their shoulders and not give a sh*t. Some clubs are specifically designed to encourage certain groups of students to participate.

Running a very small accountancy practice is not equivalent to the job of a secondary head.

I know, but what I was trying to say was that had I chosen teaching instead of accountancy, I'd have expected to be a secondary head by this stage in my career, after 3 decades, and having progressed through the management ranks in accountancy practice & industry up to Board level, all without any gaps in work and working full time throughout.

I have been a secondary teacher for five years and I have never had a performance related pay rise.

This is because my target always relates to my year 11s and (no doubt because I am not good enough to organise a piss up in a brewery) they have never all hit their (unrealistic IMO) targets.

In August some of a group including half a dozen from a very bottom set in KS3 got F/G when their target was C. They got similar grades in most other exams FWIW. So I am guessing all the shit teachers in humanities, science and maths didn't get their PRP either.

Nice way for the school to save money then.

How small is your practice? Ifrom you ran a firm that employed as many people as a secondary school, would you expect to earn more than £50k?

In our school the targets are agreed and just basing it on one year groups oeffirnsbce is very narrow.

A secondary head around here gets £85,000 minimum and some are £125,000. If anyone thinks a secondary head gets £50,000 they are very out of date or their head has had crap performance related pay rises!

If you have been teaching for a full extra year, then that experience is valuable and should be rewarded even if it can't quite be quantified

I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but I don't think I agree with your final point, quoted above.

I once went on a course to do with improving writing software (bare with me). The trainer who was very well respected, talked about some engineers having 10 years' worth of experience, where as other engineers had 1 year's worth of experience repeated 10 times . i.e. They weren't really learning from their mistakes and improving. (We then went on to do practical exercises which showed this could well be true in lots of respects).

I am not convinced that a teacher who has taught for 20 years is de facto better than one who has taught for 10 years, or even necessarily better than they themselves were after 10 years.

I can see that there will be a massive learning curve for the first 5-8 years, but after that not so much, and to be honest after a certain point I suspect there may well be a decline if a teacher doesn't for whatever reason adapt well to change.

Also, I as a parent know certain teachers who missed / not done some key things with my DD1. If these same teachers also missed other things with other children then I would be thinking maybe they aren't as good as the teachers who understood and taught DD well.

On the other hand, teachers are reliant on a bunch of teenagers actually listening and working to show results. It doesn't seem great that pay should be dependent on whether Mark from 11C bothers to revise for GCSEs. So it may well be that there isn't a method better than time served + responsibilities to pay teachers.

The £50k reference was in response to Kazzyhoward's post, not a suggestion that secondary heads only earn that much.

I used to audit private schools and one Bursar told me about value added - that basically that was the service they were selling, they could get a mediocre child better grades than a state school. Do state schools not use value added for targets? That would mean bottom sets were not necessarily disadvantaged as presumably they start from a lower point.

And I also disagree that another year experience = automatically better. I'm certainly no better than I was 3 years ago!

Do state schools not use value added for targets?

Yes, they do. Schools make a distinction between progress and attainment. Student and teacher targets in our school are related to progress.

Performance related pay doesn't exist in FE where I teach.

A F/T lecturer where i work is on around £24,000 a year.

Shame it's such crap pay. I don't mind saying that I am part of a fantastic department who are passionate about teaching and learning and frequently get asked to share our good practice. But no real pay rises in years.

There was an economist on R4 one morning this week who had retrained as a teacher. Said she had never known how many things a teacher had to do all at the same time! It's a tough job and is time it was given the salaries we deserve.

You can compare the pay and conditions of teaching favourably or unfavourably with the private sector until the cows come home, but ultimately we need to have enough decent teachers in classrooms. And we don't.

Completely agree that we need more money in the overall budget for teachers' pay, but performance related pay in itself won't drive good teachers away from the profession.

The best tangible things about teaching were the pay scale, the final salary pension and the holidays. Two of the three don’t exist anymore so there is no wonder people are leaving in droves or not even bothering in the first place.

My sector is not schools, but as employers we are actively encouraging organisations to move away from scale points to numeric salaries
and then all increments are based on merit
with the contractual right to appraisal

even in the public sector I am not in favour of automatic increments
but I understand that appraisal has to be much more 360 in the "infrastructure" part of the public sector
eg schools

noble
quite happy to chat with you in much more detail via PM
but "performance related" is in principle a good thing that I would not want to get rid of