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?

It is not performance related pay. It is progression up a payscale based on appraisal. Once you reach the top of the payscale, excellent performance is not rewarded.

Another reason to walk away from pay scales :-)

So long as the objectives are reasonable and agreed at the start of the year with senior leaders who have a good relationship with the staff

Therein lies the problem for so many teacher though

Trilbydoll Thing being, I don't see many private schools dealing on a daily basis with children whose home lives are so chaotic, or even traumatic that even arriving at school is a real achievement for them. It's like comparing apples and pears as they say, but sadly those in Gvmnt that make those decisions, have no idea.

@rubybluesunday
What are these ‘fair and realistic’ targets based on? I’ve held management roles in three different schools, using three different systems for target setting, and I’m yet to see fair and realistic targets. I’d genuinely love to know what your school does.

backforgood
In my sector, we are designing appraisal frameworks and trying to make them the default best practice.
It could be done in education too
and these are all 'non proit 'public sector' 'taxpayer funded' roles
where the stakeholders are often contrary and the decision makers are clueless

it comes down to trying to share best practice
something that SLTs at schools have often been very poor at
but genius compared with the NHS

It is not performance related pay. It is progression up a payscale based on appraisal. Once you reach the top of the payscale, excellent performance is not rewarded.
No, and appraisal meetings become tedious tick box exercises.

I have done both; private sector and teaching, in state and indie schools. PRP in my current job is fair, because it relates to how well I do my job. PRP in schools is not fair, because it depends on how well 400 children feel on the day of an exam..... The issue is schools is also that the managers (for want of a better term) are not trained to be managers, and do not generally have any experience of implementing systems like PRP. My current manager in my non-teaching job does and it is checked by their manager too. In school this never happened. It was based on the say so of one person, who unfortunately didn't like me.

I can see that there will be a massive learning curve for the first 5-8 years

But Teen that's pretty much what the pay scale relates to. M1 to M6 should take 6 years, or at least it used to when it was automatic. Then to go onto the upper pay scale you have to take on more responsibility. Then it's at least 2 years between each point on a 3 point scale.
Once you're on UPS3, that's it for pay rises (except the crappy below inflation 1% pay cut), forever, unless you get promoted. If you're not improving between 12 and 20 years, you're not getting pay rises anyway.

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

These are all bullshit targets. I hope they don't form part of performance management at your school.

So the form teacher with the top stream dedicated pupils who join every club going (who is already privileged) gets further rewarded and I with a more difficult form group (suicide in 3 families, some living in hostels, 2 in care, 1 School refuser) get the harder job and no pay rise. Lovely!

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 measure

Ugh. This is ridiculous. The targets are bullshit. Let's be honest about that. I've heard of schools with huge numbers where students have a 9 as their targets. In exams that've never been taken before....
The basis for the targets is such a tangled mess and is different from school to school. That's not really fair. Anyone who thinks this is a fair way of judging teachers does not really understand the profession.

Last year I had 2 classes go through gcse in the same subject. One a really high achieving top set. Almost every student met their target. Many exceeded their target.
The other class had around 10 students in it. I say around because of the social , emotional and behavioural issues which meant some weren't consistently there. They were struggling to get good passes in maths and English. They were never going to do extra MFL. For some of those students, their targets were ridiculous to begin with. I think 2 met their targets.....
I worked harder with the second class. But if they were my only class I could have been refused PRP/ not met my target. To me that's a flaw in the system.

And don't even get me started about encouraging after school activities and running clubs. That REALLY shows a lack of understanding. My best Form tutor work recently has been with a girl with mental health issues which manifest sometimes in behaviour issues. Sometimes she comes to me at break, lunch, before school to let off steam, talk, try to avoid a blow up in a lesson. These meetings aren't recorded or quantified. But they make a difference. That's a form tutor role.

Performance related pay is common in most other professional sectors

And are those sectors experiencing a critical recruitment and retention crisis?

If not, this argument tends to shows that PRP isn't a major factor in retention.

And massive learning curves in the first six (or so) years is common in many careers.

This isn't seeking to bash teachers, btw. It's pointing out where there are commonalities with other careers.

Now, only a few years ago there was a different massive problem - NQTs were struggling to find first posts because there were too many teachers. Where did they all go? Did the number entering training gomdown at the point when all everyone was talking about was over supply?

Now, only a few years ago there was a different massive problem - NQTs were struggling to find first posts because there were too many teachers. Where did they all go? Did the number entering training gomdown at the point when all everyone was talking about was over supply?

I’m not sure what your point is here @Moggy. Do you think we’re lying about the retention crisis? If you genuinely don’t know, let me tell you a story...

Once upon a time there was an education system. It wasn’t perfect, but it was working. It was staffed by a pretty passionate bunch. They were people who really cared about others and who wanted the best possible outcomes for them.

Then along came a man. We’ll call him Michael, for that was his name. Michael was also pretty passionate and he had Power. He decided that because this education system wasn’t exactly like the one he’d experienced back in the 1950s, it couldn’t possibly be doing any good so he set about changing it.

Now, a sensible person wanting to improve something might think it through, talk to the experts, make ‘A Plan’. They might decide to introduce changes slowly, perhaps consult with the teachers who would be delivering this plan, allow lots of time for exam boards and schools to prepare, but not Michael. Oh no. He made a few rash decisions for the sake of headlines, tried to get his name known for creating a more ‘robust’ system (y’know, so that we might remember that name he next time he applied for a Big Job) and generally went about pissing of all of those passionate people, who found it very hard to speak out because Michael and his cronies criticised them in the press and said they just wanted more money). He also totally screwed with the education of thousands of teenagers, not least the classes of 2014 (changing the English specifications TWICE part way through their course), the class of 2017 (guinea pigs for the new 9-1 English and maths) and 2018 (guinea pigs for all of the other 9-1s)

Alongside this, Michael introduced prp, despite knowing it was going to be impossible to measure progress effectively as he’d messed with the system so much.

So yes, some teachers started leaving, then their friends saw that the leavers seemed happy, so they left. Then graduates started asking around before signing up for teaching courses (seen the threads on the Staffroom? They give brutal accounts of what teaching is like now) and decided it didn’t sound much fun...

So there’s a retention crisis. A serious one. Most teachers aren’t actually against the idea of prp, they just haven’t seen a fair way of measuring performance.

My dd is in year 12 at school and from her starting secondary in year 7 to now I've seen how the recruitment crisis has affected her school badly. Kind of started off ok and has got progressively worse. No chemistry teacher during her gcse year, the PE teacher is teaching French, four different English supply teachers in year 10 as they all kept quitting (2 walked out mid lesson, one after throwing a pen at a kid and then collapsing on the floor crying). Her HOY said they just couldn't find science or maths teachers.

My Sister was a science teacher and was told she would have to teach maths as well, so she quit and hasn't gone back to teaching. Decided to be a dinner lady at the local primary instead.

My friends husband hasn't progressed up his pay band as he's been told all the kids in a certain class need to pass their gcse/or maybe make enough progress (can't remember which) and one kid arsed about all year and didn't work - so he doesn't get his pay rise. How is that fair?

My school sets two targets for pupils a minimum (their actual target) and a higher . All pupils are expected to reach their higher which is the 25 percentile - so only 25% expected to reach it.
I have a set 5, core subject. All predicted 3 as minimum target (as in target) and 4 as higher. In the mock exams three got a 5, the rest 3. As a result of this I am on a special plan where I have to provide every lesson plan, have had to meet with various SLT to explain what I am doing and have extra lessons with these pupils every night. Based on these results I will fail PRP. Yet every child would have reached their actual target ...

That's outrageous, piece

We also end up with the ridiculous situation where the precise grade gained in an exam can mean more to the teacher than it does to the student. Immense pressure is put on the teacher to run around after the student, endless revision and intervention sessions, monitoring reports, liaising with parents and managers. And if little Johnny has decided that they only need a 5 in Maths to get onto the course of their choice, there's not a lot the teacher can do about the thing that would really count towards little Johnny improving his grade, and that's little Johnny pulling their finger out and doing some work. It's a huge workload issue for teachers and also not good for the students.

And then we end up with kids going to university, failing an assignment and raging at the professors for not giving them extra support.

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.

Oh my goodness, just stopped laughing about this! This is so off the mark and typical of some Governors to spout this rubbish

And to go on and on about your Staff’s fair targets makes it even worse. Are they set by FFT? ALPs? Our school had an INSET from FFT where they admitted that the ‘similar schools and pupils’ were often made up and never existed and only showed a ‘likelihood’ of matching scores. Thank goodness my Head scrapped them very shortly after but sadly most schools still use them and not only that, but they bump another grade on top of that to make them ‘aspirational’.
What about ‘Life without levels’? How do your Staff do this uniformly across all subjects when OfQUAL don’t even know yet. What happens when some pupils are tutored and some are not? What about the ground work a previous teacher put in in past years? What about a teacher taking over from a poorer teacher? Makes a complete mockery of the term SMART and I truly feel for your Staff. You say most meet them but that is not all and I wonder how anxious this all makes them feel.

noblegiraffe I think PRP should go in its current form.

What would you replace it with, kitty that would actually be fair and reasonable? That couldn't be misused by academy chains to keep staff costs down?

Kitty I agree with you, this is the sort of thing governess think when they don't really have a clue about what actually goes on. As if SMART objectives are somehow a new an foolproof idea. In my opinion there's nothing wrong in principle with performance related pay (not that this actually really exists in schools) but it's the problems that piece relays above that makes the whole system a mockery. Turning children in to statistics quite often just doesn't work and thus it is very difficult to set decent targets.

Governors not governess!

What really worries me is the governor who posted that children's progress against their targets as a reasonable measure for teacher performance.

There is no accurate measure of children's progress at that sort of level (progress isn't linear!) and children's targets are often bobbins.

This is one of the many reasons I'm leaving teaching. In actual fact, i handedmy notice in a week ago Monday and HR have called or emailed every day since to ask me to change my mind and said they won't accept my resignation till Wednesday, and I'm in primary not secondary.

I work fivemornings a week, my contracted hours are until 12 every day. Staff meetings are aftrschool so I stay until 5/6 every week on that day -5/6 unpaid hours. At least three times a half term we hold after school
Events which finish at 7 so that's 3x7 lots of unpaid hours, and that's without staying later for displays etc and the work I put in at home.

For a PP to say that PRP should be based on whether we encourage pupils to go to after school clubs and whether we organise school trips is ridiculous. Out of this world. For a start, do you think teachers are paid to hold clubs? Many teachers have children in childcare, so you'd be expecting them to pay for childcare while working for free. School trips - if I want to organise a school trip (which I have done) I don't get given classroom time to do that, I have to go after school or atthe weekend, again unpaid.

Inmy previous school, we got given one pack of paper per half term. Everything else, more paper, laminating pouches, pens, everything came out of our own pockets. For inspection week I spent £40 on resources alone. They went through nursery teachers on such a frequent basis that there were no resources there because they were taken with them, so I had to buy dressing up clothes, books, paints, you name it I bought it.

This year my teacher friend got her 1% pay rise which amounted to £22 extra a month. Because this pushed her over a bracket with the pension company, she is now £12 worse off a month.

I work(ed) in a school with 4 teachers. In three years, 4 have been off with anxiety and depression, 3 long term. Of those three, two quit in the end and now I'm quitting. Of the many many supply staff that covered those 4, some have been good, two were kept on a longer term and ended up turning down the offered permanent jobs citing stress.

Teaching is a crap profession which is a shame because he job itself is fabulous.

I have extensive experience with setting and managing bonus schemes, both inside and outside of the education sector.

I believe that in a minority or sectors/situations they can be positive, but so often they do not achieve what they were supposedly designed to achieve.

When I was involved in HR and setting bonuses in the education sector, every now and then someone would suggest teachers should receive bonuses based upon various criteria, which would usually include: student progress, student results, student and or parent feedback, etc. I am proud to say, that on my watch, none of these was ever implemented. This didn’t gain me many friends and I was looked upon as being very backward thinking. On occasions I would direct others to various research that shows that individual bonus schemes do not usually work.

In nearly all circumstances I suggest making fair salary schemes that do not include individual bonuses.

NB: I have never worked in a K-12 school, but can’t see my opinions changing if I ever did.

I also gave up hope on governors when I became a teacher governor. Again, contracted to finish at 12, governor meetings rarely finished before 9. We had parent governors raise complaints along the lines of speeding cars on the road outside school and the fact that their children ran along the road athome time instead of walking nicely... after the children had been dismissed and turned over to the care of their parent.