Michael Gove - wrong again: Performance-related pay in schools is crap

[noblegiraffe]

In new research that will surprise no teacher ever, performance-related pay has been shown to be ineffective in schools. It doesn’t raise school standards and it doesn’t improve staff retention.

We tried to tell Gove but would he listen? Can we get rid of it now?

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/performance-related-pay-ineffective-schools-study-finds

admission have you not seen those lovely stats that show no two teachers would grade or judge an identical lesson the same?

You suggest that somehow this is an objective measure?

We are a small school so there’s nowhere to hide.

Success criteria are set between staff and SLT when targets are set. Staff set the success criteria, SLT can change them with consultation. We expect staff to set themselves decent progress goals. Many goals are related to staff professional development, so it’s in staff interest to make them achieveable and decent, worthwhile targets that benefit the school and the staff. SLT are required to undergo unconscious bias training and training on how to conduct an appraisal. No system is perfect.

This system has been running for a few years and I’ve been involved from the beginning as a governor. We’ve consulted staff at all levels, right from the beginning, both anonymously and through face to face conversations with governors responsible for staff performance and we think we have a fairly honest view of the system.

Our staff turnover is very low.

We are a small school so there’s nowhere to hide.
So how do you deal with character clashes, or do the SLT only hire people like me ?

And what about the staff who get the TA to do all the hard work (like organising external speakers) but take the credit ?
Do the TA's get PRP ?

Yes, TAs have a performance related component to their salary progression. We can’t guarentee that there won’t be character clashes, in the same way no organisation can. We do expect our staff to be professional about it. As far as possible, success criteria are objective to guard against personality issues.

Just because we can’t make a perfect system, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do PRP.

jaffa your system sounds far better thought out than many. The clincher is whether you have any targets related to pupil performance? Or any targets that reward teachers who can run residentials or similar that discriminate against part timers and those with caring commitments.

We’ve put a lot of thought into it. We can’t recruit or retain teachers by offering shedloads of cash, the only way we can recruit and retain good staff is through being a good place to work. Our only pupil performance criteria is the progress (not absolute attainment) of pupil premium and SEND pupils. Targets are aligned generally to the School Improvement Plan, so things like residentials don’t really contribute much to that. We have some part time teachers who are as happy as full timers with the system.

Our limitation is ultimately budget - we are going to have years where we can’t offer PRP simply because we can’t afford to. Which is quite shit.

What happens if PP/SEN students don't make progress/ how are you measuring the progress? because, let's face it, some target grades are 'interesting' to say the least. And I know that I would be expected to show 'outstanding ' progress if we had PRP.

Indicator grades seem so rarely fully understood. Typically, a range of children will perform both above and below them (they after all represent average performance of a child with the same prior attainment), and yet any below are seen as failures of the system/ by the teacher.

And don't get me started on the nonsense of performance measures for new GCSEs!

You can’t quantify progress, certainly over the year a teacher has the class.

1. There are no accurate measures with which to quantify this
2. Some things can’t be quantified.

... and of course all the classes spilt between two teachers!

And progress would be measured from a baseline measure set by the previous teacher which will be, if the previous teacher has one eye on their pay progression, as high as they can justify it.

hmmm... we measure progress from last official data points as it goes , not internal guesstimates but that in itself is deeply flawed... correlation between KS2 maths and English to KS4 English success is tenuous to say the least.

In secondary you might get by only using official data points by only using exam classes, but you can’t do that in primary! Jaffa’s school is presumably using made-up data to measure progress.

yes, I presume so...

Piggywaspushed

Its even more flawed when KS2 data for maths and English is used to measure music, drama, art and tech.

A statistician might tell you not so. But I agree with you!

We are given an indicator grade and then, suddenly, when they have actually done their GCSEs we are told how many levels progress they made from the last key stage (expected I believe is 4 for outstanding but might be 3) and I always think well wft weren't me measuring them on that for the first place? It makes so much more sense!!

Because students on a higher starting level generally make faster progress (in line with the faster progress that they made at primary to get to the higher level at KS2) so comparisons are useless?

In a setted subject like maths, it becomes glaringly obvious how useless all these performance measures are. Want a good performance review? Nab yourself top set. Want to manage out a member of staff? Give them bottom set.

And how absolutely stupid is it to rate a teacher based on GCSE results against target or progress from KS2 when they have only taught that exam class for probably 2/5 of their secondary career?

How idiotic to rate a teacher on A-level results when at least 50% of the work is meant to be done outside of the classroom (ever told the kids that they need to do 1 hour of independent work for every hour they are taught?).

The system is cracked and it worries me that even apparently people like jaffa who have spent time, care and effort on their performance management system don’t recognise it.

One year ,the indicator grades for an entire A level class I taught was B. Every single one of them. In the end , of course, some got Bs, many got Cs,a couple got Ds and two daredevil overachievers got As!

The indicator grade bore absolutely no relation to how they had done in subjects similar to the A level at GCSE : some of them had scraped Cs for English Lit and others had A*s. Bonkers.

In fact (sorry soapbox!) DS1's school aren't particularly worried about his predicted C for Spanish, given that is his 'minimum expected grade' even though he got full marks in his GCSE!

A statistician might tell you not so.

A statistician would tell you that statistics are not meant to be applied as predictions to individuals. A statistic which might prove accurate and even useful over a large cohort is going to be total balls when you look at each kid.

A statistician would cry about how data is being misused in schools.

Kids should not be judged by their performance against a computer-generated average prediction. Teachers should not be judged by their classes’ individual performances against computer-generated average predictions. You could possibly look at the class average performance against average targets, but the sample size is too small to be considered reliable and you have the issue of the teacher only having taught the class for a small period of their education so this can’t be used as a performance measure. They were designed to measure the average student achievement against targets across a cohort, and for this to be a measure of the school performance.

And even then that’s not used for anything any more. Progress 8 is supposed to be better, but they’re even having to fiddle those calculations because of the problem with outliers skewing school data.

The data have landed

First they said they needed data about the children
to find out what they’re learning.
Then they said they needed data about the children
to make sure they are learning.
Then the children only learnt what could be turned into data.
Then the children became data.

Micheal Rosen

I read this on Twitter and it made me laugh and sigh.

Feels like half a poem , though. I feel like there is waaaay more data than that!

Oh noble I would love to put you in a room with our data geek man and have an argument with him about these things! I have tried to put these things to him before but he starts talking about lines of best fit at me until I glaze over a bit. He is a genuinely brainy guy but I am afraid everyone is rather in awe of him and so, if he says it, it must be true. And of course he has never taught children. (he was, however, taught by me !)

How does one measure the progress of PP students, for example?

I got an email last year congratulating me on the 'outstanding progress' of a PP boy in my class and wanting my tips on how I achieved this amazing feat . This overlooked somewhat the fact that in the very same class, three other PP students all (allegedly statistically blah blah) missed their indicator by two grades!

And all in the year of the new GCSE!

I ignored the email.

A strange thing about measuring progress is that it is still measured in so many ways, progress 8, fft (B and D), value added etc.

and although they are not supposed to affect your PRP they do if the SLT or HT deems that they should, and this also goes for PPG, FSM, SEND etc.

And all of the effort that is put in to this by the teacher gets overlooked.

The frustration I have with prp is when sets are changed close to an exam to target students, so I now have a class, half of which I have taught since January, the other half I have just met, and I will be expected to comment on their GCSE results. One year I was hauled in to explain why I got no C grades. On a foundation maths paper that only goes up to a D

Performance management and appraisals are fine, ask the teacher how they are approaching a class of a certain expected level, but you cannot hold teachers responsible for teenagers, or small children's, actions, especially when everyone in education knows that the other outside of school factors have a much bigger effect on attainment.