I want to
address and dismiss performance related pay (PRP) for teachers but the bombastic
Gove appals me again, and again, I dread his daily edicts. He now dismisses headteachers who disagree
with him (the mild mannered National Association of Headteachers) and the
teachers unions with whom he will meet but not negotiate. Yesterday he has told
Northern Ireland and Wales Education ministers to go away if they oppose him. They
are all, “enemies of promise.”
Turning to new
“laws” on teachers’ pay: I think it is
fair to propose that teachers would like to be paid more. The (PRP) logic seems
straightforward. The job of teachers is
to promote student achievement. Therefore pay teachers more for better results
and they will get better results. Apparently this approach temporarily raised
sales of Mars Bars, albeit at the expense of reduced sales of other chocolates.
There is
nothing wrong in examining and developing the best practice in our schools. There
is nothing wrong with getting rid of policies, people and roles that restrict
student achievement. There is nothing wrong with providing staff training opportunities which lead to
progression, better pay and promotion. Good heads should be able to identify
good teachers; good schools should be led by a vision and should be able to
value its staff and their likelihood of achieving the vision.
Mr Wise
Monkey Gove’s new education law says that teachers can only progress on the
main pay spine according to performance related criteria. We all know that will
mean exam results as we live in a results driven system. Get me more GCSEs in
English and Maths and I must forgive all sins: shout and bully the kids, deal
rote learning cards to the innocent , repeat and repeat and repeat the
narrowest ranges of knowledge; go mnemonic-wild, drill and recite in some Dickensian nightmare and jump up and down screaming,
”Pass! Pass! Pass!”
Before
becoming a teacher I spent a week in a boys’ school in Neasden at the time of
their Annual, Big Deal, End of Summer Term General Knowledge Test. The Remedial
class, housed in a separate building, came first across the whole of the
school. I was stunned by this contradiction to my lower expectations but just
as I was fitting the barbed wire underpants I was told that they had practised
the questions, over and over, throughout the year. Maximum performance pay to
that teacher!
Whilst the
PRP policy laudibly aims to attract and retain the best teachers schools will
not receive one penny of additional money so for every teacher getting extra pay
it seems likely that another teacher will be paid less. The better your classes
do, according to the most objective measures we can muster, the more you get
paid, as long as we can pay someone less.
If we pay by
results then our teacher of Year 11 Set 1 Maths will do nicely, whilst our Set
8, who make slower progress, should earn their teacher a pay cut. Both sets had
different teachers two years previously, and different teachers four years before
that. These teachers should be rewarded or
fined for the foundations they laid. The junior school teachers who did or did
not correctly instil times tables mastery should be hunted down and deified or
imprisoned as part of PRP. Goodness knows who gets the money when we have team
teaching, split classes or additional help.
Apparently, teachers
should be rewarded with extra money for students behaving well. Is that the
silent ones or those lively team players in simulations and group challenges? Notices proclaiming, “Noise costs pay!” could
replace stunning art displays. Ofsted
said Chauncy students’ behaviour was impeccable – do I get the cash or should
it go to the cook and the caretaker?
Detour into
what our detractors call the real world and we find the best example of PRP:
the bankers. They received millions of pounds in bonuses to sell mortgages to
unemployed no-income families. Bankers fixed
interest rates to make a killing and sold needless insurance and profitless
endowment policies to millions of people in order to earn their bonuses.
Bankers are credited with causing our current world-wide recession and yet fantastic
bonuses are still being paid whilst low income working families are battered by
austerity budgets throughout Europe. PRP will take away your shame.
Painfully I
once worked with glass fibre matting in a Park Royal factory. I was on a 22 day
contract with a promised bonus for early job completion. Without protective
clothing my skin was torn by billions of needle-sharp fibres ripping it apart
at every move. There were two of us working and we toiled dramatically well and
quickly to complete in 8 bloodied days. Relieved to be gone we received our pay
with a £2.50 bonus – about 6% of what we saved our employer. So what price
helping a child pass History GCSE?
Trying to
get MPs to do what they are employed to do is nigh impossible. Liberal
Democrats should lose all their pay for promising not to raise university
tuition fees and then raising them, The Tories should lose theirs for failing to
reduce our national deficit whilst blaming the poor, and Labour should be
pilloried in stocks and rendered penniless for failing to provide any
opposition.
Back to
teachers. Yes, they want more pay and their unions will take them out on
fruitless one day strikes to press for better pay. One does not have to go all
the way with new age thinking or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to know that teachers
respond to higher order aspects of humanity. Teachers are not MPs or bankers
and they will not be driven solely by money; even keeping them poor will not
stop them. There is, unfortunately, empirical evidence for this.
School staff
work together as a school or it is probably a poor school. Teachers respond to
a degree of autonomy, the freedom to try new ideas with the respect and
recognition that comes from student, parent and colleague appreciation. They
want to be challenged rather than alienated from their labour. They work best
when trusted and they work to an old fashioned notion of vocation: doing well
by their students according to moral imperatives. And, they enjoy their work,
are happy, involved and excited when it’s about teaching and achievement.
10 years ago
our school was given around £25,000 from central government as a reward for
raising achievement. We split it equally between, teachers, assistants and
caretaker alike. They all contributed to the students’ achievement. That is my
kind of PRP at work.
I know that
some headteachers are wondering if the
new PRP scales will give them the opportunity to tell some teachers that they
are not good enough to progress. We should already be doing this as part of our
daily work and using established systems for dealing with under-performing staff,
with a timetable for improvement or exit. Waiting for the PRP hammer is at best
unwieldly, at worst, cowardly.
I think it is the headteacher’s job to protect and improve the pay and
conditions of our staff, not to scurry around looking for opportunities to put
them down. In 35 years I have seen the quality of teaching soar and if Mr Mad
Swivel-eyed Gove was left to praise himself entirely alone with a mirror in an
otherwise silent cell there could be endless options to help us create a
magnificent world-class education system.
