Performance Management

It's that time of the year again when performance management rears its ugly head for teachers. This didn't exist when I first entered the profession, but in a bid to bring teaching (along with other public sector jobs) closer to the private sector, performance management was introduced.

It goes something along these lines:

• Each teacher has to think up between three and five targets to be completed within the next 12 months. As there is a choice, pretty much everyone chooses three targets, apart from those who want to move up the management ladder quickly, who choose more than three.
• The targets are chosen during a discussion with your line manager and involve what are known as "SMART" targets - basically meaning that they are not too woolly and their success can be judged using data. I never remember what SMART stands for, but it's something like "Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Targets"; in fact having put "SMART" into a popular search engine, that's exactly what it stands for. I'm quietly pleased with myself.
• One target is about exam data, one is about your teaching development and one is about how you can help others in your department/working as a team.
• You can also request CPD courses, which are unlikely to happen since schools have no budget to pay for them.
• These targets are then reviewed in a year's time, and it is decided during a meeting with your line manager whether you have passed them. If one or more of the targets appears a bit touch-and-go as far as you passing it is concerned, then you have to provide statistical evidence to back up your claim.

 And that's basically it, although what senior management usually add is that the passing/failing of these targets could have an effect on your future pay. This is meant to encourage staff to take them seriously, but rarely do many staff do so for the following reasons:

• Teachers have a pay freeze that is going to last for a few years because the world is skint, so our pay's already effected in a fairly major way.
• It can effect a teacher's progression up the "Upper Pay Spine", but in some schools (mine being one of those) progression is barred by the fact that no-one will ever get the results that their classes are targeted, due to us being measured against a student's "aspirational target", or in other words, a target that they have very little chance of achieving but is meant to motivate those students to try as hard as they can to perform to the best of their ability. As we all know, teenagers don't always think or get motivated quite like adults, so what's the point in the first place?
• The sensible of us out there will only put down targets that they were intending to hit anyway, like "provide resources for use by the whole department", which is something that any self-respecting teacher would do as part of their day-to-day job.

The whole process is a total waste of time, and as the colleague who is in charge of it at our school said to me when I said with my tongue firmly wedged into my cheek that I couldn't wait for my performance management meeting, "at least you're not the idiot who has to stand up in front of everyone and try to convince them that it's a worthwhile use of their time".

Performance management is yet another of those "great" ideas imposed by someone in a suit in Whitehall who has had little or no experience of the job.

Can't wait to fail mine again this year! What a great motivator for what is already a depressed profession.