Performance Related Pay - Smoke and Mirrors

We got an email recently telling us that we had to complete our Performance Management so that they can be approved by the wise and worldly at the top of the food chain. It's the usual fayre:

1. Grade related - 100% have to meet their given target.
2. Department related - how can to assist the department's move forward?
3. Professional development related - something you need to work one.
4. To do with TLR payment, if you receive one.

Now I have no problem with any of these types of target in essence - every teacher has to do them and in my experience, they are the same school in, school out. The only difference this year is that a teacher's success in achieving those targets will form the basis of the judgement upon whether they should receive a pay rise or not.

So as a result, I have a problem with one of them - the most important one as far as Ofsted, league tables and ultimately job security are concerned: target 1. The targets at our school were described by Ofsted as being extremely challenging, but teachers are expected to drag, in some cases kicking and screaming, all their charges up to those grades.

Just to explain how targets are generated, for those who don't know: in short, by various computer programmes that analyse the children's previous exam results, what they eat, and various other stuff and come up with a number of targets along the lines of:

• Target 1 - the child would get this in their sleep.
• Target 2 - what the child would get if they progress at the "normal" rate.
• Target 3 - what a child would get if absolutely everything went right, luck was on their side and the examiner inexplicably awarded you an extra 20%. Ok so not the last bit, but in order for the child to achieve this target, something special needs to happen and the child makes well above average progress.

Guess which one we use...

As a motivator, the message "your targets are almost impossible, but you still have to achieve them" is not a great one. Perhaps that's why schools are haemorrhaging staff - just a thought.

So after a rant about targets being "achievable", 100% being unreasonable when Ofsted didn't expect the wholeschool to get 100% and that some of my class don't even turn up to school, I was told exactly how I should word my targets in order to achieve without achieving them. As long as I tick a set of, frankly meaningless, boxes, it makes absolutely no difference what grades my classes get, in theory of course, because if my class' results were that bad I would fail, but as long as I get close-ish, I'll be fine.

My next thought was that this makes the entire process pointless, which hasn't changed, and I doubt ever will. The entire process is about your ability to word your targets and manipulate data in such a way that you can con your way to a tick in each box.

Of course, if you manage to word your targets correctly, you then lay yourself at the mercy of the whim of your headteacher and whether there's enough money in the pot for the school to afford your pay rise.

The brave new education world - it's rubbish.

Conference Season

I really don't like Easter. It's not the holidays because after all, that is one of the few benefits of being a teacher. It's because the three major teaching unions (NUT, NASUWT and ATL) have their conferences.

Now I like unions, and I think that they have an important part to play in the life if any teacher (those who aren't members of a union are fools I'm afraid). They provide support for any teacher who finds themselves in a bit of a jam whilst at work. They will, if the case warrants it, provide legal support whose cost would be prohibitive otherwise.

So if I actually like unions, why do I dislike their conferences?

The problem is that anyone who is a member can make a speech in theory. Now I might sound undemocratic at this stage, but some people need to be prevented from talking in public. All unions have militant members, many of whom probably have a reasonable point, but the fact is that they just sound a bit pathetic and ranting.

Currently teaching has a few issues of which these are the main two:

1. Ofsted - the fear of senior management in schools is almost unbearable and the Chief Inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw comes across as a bully and an idealist living in a fantasy world. The workload his rhetoric has produced is unsustainable and is driving people out of the profession.
2. Michael Gove - Secretary of State for Education. He is in the process (presumably because he knows that his party won't get voted back in at the next election) of radically changing the way schools work and teach the youth of the country at a frightening pace. Some of it is sensible and needs doing but much of it is lamentable, and this has been stated to him repeatedly by "experts". He ploughs on regardless.

There are others: pensions, pay freezes, attitude to learning and pupil/parental behaviour being among them.

The problem is that rather than focusing on pointing out the flaws in Wilshaw and Gove's policies, members if the various unions have cried "strike" at every given opportunity. There's a reason that this is a stupid and frankly annoying way to go from those speaking at the various conferences. The votes of no confidence are fair enough however - Gove and Wilshaw need to know just how unpopular and unwanted they are.

In the public's eyes teachers are doing a job that few would choose; on a par with the police if truth be told. Teachers do get 13 weeks of holiday each year (something the police don't get), and it's an accusation regularly levelled at teachers. So when the NUT are reported to have asked for teaching time to be limited to 20 hours per week this doesn't go down well with Joe Public as our Joe doesn't realise that classroom time is the least of a teacher's worries. The general public have no idea what goes into a lesson, and why would they? They just assume that teachers turn up and whitter on about stuff then mark a few books - end of.

What teaching currently needs is public support before a series of strikes over pay and pensions from the NUT and NASUWT who represent around 90% of teachers. By asking for what the public will perceive as less work is frankly idiotic. The fact that most teachers have little more than 20 hours per week of teaching time makes the request even more idiotic.

Teaching unions must get their act together. Most of the country find politicians abomnible, but by making silly requests they are playing into these people's hands. I have no idea if the unions have a PR department, but if they do they need replacing. It's inviting the press and public to label teachers as lazy, whinging freeloaders with too much holiday.

That's why I hate Easter.

Longer Hours and Summer School

Money is being pumped into providing summer schools for "disadvantaged" children. What a great idea! Whose going to staff it though? Those with a full-time teaching job might want to do a week or two, but not the whole summer surely, and who will plug the gaps? Those who aren't full-time teachers? And there's probably a reason why they haven't got a job...

The argument above could be irrelevant though as if teachers want to improve their pay packet then they will have to work longer hours, and maybe working in a summer school could be an expectation rather than a choice.

Wilshaw is a vile and "outstandingly" arrogant individual in my opinion, and has an uncanny knack of winding up the people he oversees. But actually his latest comments are fair enough I think. All he's saying is that if you want a pay rise, you have to earn it - no problem there. The trouble is that he's has wound up the teaching profession so that they now automatically jump up and down every time he opens his mouth. To be honest the only thing he has really done wrong is give the anti-teacher group a bone to gnaw on about teachers leaving at 3pm, which rarely happens nowadays, and he really ought to be chastised for it and forced to apologise. He won't.

He made his statements in an interview with The Times on Saturday where the interviewer asked if he was a "control freak". He left the interview asking himself "Am I a control freak?" and I can answer that for you Mike: Yes you are. His arrogance oozes out of every pore as the interviewer suggests that his views on teacher development were "unbending", upon which he stated that everyone should share his views. Having a vision is great, but being so convinced that you have got it right is not healthy, and suggests that you believe that you are superior to everyone else, a trait that could be placed at the door of many a tyrant throughout history.

All in all, teaching has become an undesirable profession, and I fear that in 10 years time there'll be a huge shortage of people willing to enter the profession purely due to the behaviour of today's politicians. Well done folks.

One question I would ask is whether the Head of Ofsted is really worth £180,000 of public money per year? Especially when the person receiving that paycheck thinks of himself as a teaching Clint Eastwood. What an arse!

Performance Related Pay

Michael Gove announced that the DfE would be pushing for teachers to be paid in line with their students' results, as suggested by the Education Select Committee.

Head of Department: "Who wants to teach the bottom set?"
Try to avoid the crush as the entire department rush for that one!

This is the latest in a line of policies that will drive teachers out of the profession. There will be numerous people who work in the private sector who will say "I can't see the problem - that's what we have". I can understand that things could be seen like this, but there's one vital factor that is being ignored: "children".

Now the drive behind this is to improve standards of teaching and encourage the better teachers by paying them more, at the same time getting rid of poor teachers. Again I have no problem with this theory, the trouble is that a good, even outstanding teacher could appear to be inadequate depending on the class sat in front of them. Some children are simply unteachable, whatever you do, and somebody has to teach them because they have to be somewhere. This could affect that teacher's pay through no fault of the teacher, which I think you'd agree is unfair.

The government want all children to aspire to great things, but what they fail to grasp is that not all have or will ever have any aspirations beyond their state provided home, sofa, satellite TV and any other vices they may take a shine to. It's like trying to force a car to go at 100mph when it has no petrol in it; it ain't gonna happen.

Politicians seem fixated on getting everyone "above average" (I know that's impossible by the way, if only the politicians did), and squeezing teachers in order to do this. The lack of aspiration in the country, due to being able to live relatively well on benefits is the issue, as children learn these attitudes from their parents. But millions of voters being slated by politicians isn't the way to win elections; destroying a profession annoys far less people; a no-brainer.

Unions are up-in-arms of course, but cleverly the government are getting all these unpopular policies out at the same time to make it appear that the unions are whinging constantly which goes on to erode any public support they may have.

No wonder election turnouts are so low: they are all pathetic excuses for human beings with no idea what goes on outside of their publicly funded mansions, and therefore not worth the effort of voting for.

My dream: we have an election that no-one actually votes in. It might actually send a message, although no doubt there will be someone paid a lot of money to put a positive spin on it.

More Strikes Ahead

The two biggest teaching unions, the NUT and the NASUWT are having their annual conferences this week you are bound to see plenty of articles about strikes over pensions. It seems that anyone who is either a teacher or is related to one seems to be on the side of the teaching profession, but anyone whose experience of teaching is that they went to school a while ago seems to keep pointing out that teachers' work short hours, get long holidays and should see their job as a "vocation".

Whilst I sympathise with those on the outside seeing teachers striking seemingly on a whim, meaning that they are inconvenienced over strikes/closure of schools, something has to be done. I am not convinced that striking is the answer however, as dwindling public support will only give politicians ammunition.

It's funny how those who don't teach like to point out the benefits of the job - if the benefits are so great, why haven't they chosen teaching as a career?

So what are the benefits according to those who don't?

1. Holidays - 13 weeks per year in state education. Bear in mind that teachers have no choice over when they can take their holidays, and the lovely, supportive travel companies double their prices at least to cash in on the increased business. Also take into account that teachers don't get paid for the holiday time, only the time they spend in class - the wages are spread out across the year.
2. That leads me onto pay - competitive, indeed, and one can't grumble about the hourly rate paid for classroom time, but teachers get nothing for planning and preparation time outside of school hours, which is normally around the same number of hours as the time spent in the classroom. All of a sudden that hourly rate for time in the classroom is halved and not so attractive.
3. It's a vocation, as someone pointed out on a recent BBC message board, so teachers should just be happy to have their dream job and the money is irrelevent. I'd like to spend time on the cloud that poster came from, it must be lovely surviving on happiness alone.
4. Apparently teachers only work from 9am to 3pm during the week - I wish! I am not unusual in that I arrive before 8am and leave at around 5pm every day, occasionally taking work home. I know that many colleagues work at home until late into the evening - they certainly don't pay me enough to do that every evening. If something is urgent, then fair enough, but there was something called a work/life balance a few years ago, although you'd need a good memory to recall those days in teaching!

The problem is that people remember the bad old days when some teachers (the ones we all seemingly remember) were, shall we say, less inclined to plan lessons and spent much of a lesson sat at their desk reading a newspaper. They were few and far between, but for some reason everyone seems to think that they were the majority rather than the minority. In very expensive schools, you didn't even need to be qualified so essentially made it up as you went along!

What teachers and potential teachers face nowadays is the following:

• Training for a minimum of 4 years at the cost of thousands of pounds per year, and if you don't get a first or second class degrees, forget it. With those sorts of qualifications in some subject areas (eg. maths and physics), you could earn a lot more in industry with far less grief. Ultimately there will be no teachers in some areas of the curriculum.
• Pay freezes for a couple of years, meaning that teachesr are increasingly worse off.
• Pensions where you pay increasing amounts in and receive ever decreasing amounts when you retire, assuming you haven't pegged out by then.
• Retirement age increases to 67 or 68: I heard a great statistic the other day. Teachers who retire at 60 live for 17 years on average; teachers who retire at 65 live for 17 months on average. So the policy seems designed to kill ex-teachers off! Almost genocide!!!
• Conditions that are almost unbearable due to unsupportive parents and a system so wrapped up in red tape that students who cause a problem can't be dealy with effectively.
• A curriculum that is constantly being tinkered with by people who have no experience of teaching in the modern classroom, meaning extra work (in their own time) for teachers trying to keep up with the changes.
• Ofsted and politicians insisting that all students get good grades, whether they make any effort or not. If the student refuses to work, that's the teacher's fault.
• The threat of the sack hanging over every teacher due to recent government policy changes,
• The drive for all schools to become academies meaning that headteachers get more power and can sack any teacher they aren't keen on, regardless of teaching ability.
• Changes in regional pay to reflect the area in which the school is situated, which can only mean one thing: many teachers will see a drop in pay, or a frozen pay packet for far longer than previously advertised.

The list could go on and on and adds up to the fact that fewer and fewer people will enter the profession and more and more will leave. You don't have to be a genius to work out that this situation isn't healthy for anyone: teachers, parents or students. Politicians won't care, as long as they look good in the press.

I do understand that the general public are getting a bit tired of hearing/seeing whinging teachers in the media, but there are good reasons for the moaning, I just wish we could avoid strikes. The NASUWT had the right idea by working to rule, but it needs to go a bit further to really make an impact. Any suggestions?

Haeadteachers - worth the money?

It's probably no secret that headteachers are paid a lot of money. It depends on the size of the school (the more pupils there are, the more responsibility, the higher the wage) and whether the school has control over it's own budget i.e. it's an academy. Some academy headteachers are paid more than the prime minister gets at over £100k per year.

But are they all worth it and what is their actual role in a school?

I've worked under a number of headteachers in my career, of varying effectiveness. But since my teaching career started I've never really been sure what a "normal" day as a headteacher entails, other than a whole load of meetings. What these meetings are about, I have no idea and many will probably have little or no bearing on my existence as a classroom practioners.

Almost all are qualified teachers, but I've only ever had one who actually taught any lessons, although I should say that they taught a lesson per week, compared to the 20 or so that a regular teacher would teach, but at least that head had some contact with students other than just to tell them off or congratulate them in assembly.

The lot of many headteachers now involves little or no contact with the students themselves due to the apparent mountains of paperwork and endless meetings. I find it a little odd that someone who went into teaching wants to minimise their contact with students. But maybe the pound signs are too great a pull for them to resist, and on their wages I can kind of understand that.

The trouble is that with so little contact with students, a headteacher's effectiveness as a disciplinarian becomes less and less. Another head I worked under came out of their office one day (a rare occurance I should add) to be met with a well-known troublemaker swinging on the bannisters of the stairs. I happened to be descending those same stairs at the time. The head chose to challenge the student, and this is how the conversation went:

Head: Where should you be? (The head couldn't remember the child's name)
Child: What's it to you?
Head: I'm your headteacher.
Chuld: I don't believe you; I've never seen you before.

At that point the head went back into the office they'd just vacated, not to be seen again. I managed to chivvy the student along to where they should have been because I knew his name and he recognised me as a teacher and a person in authority, of sorts. There's another story as far as this head goes, and it's not too dissimilar to the first, just quicker. The head upon leaving the office stumbled into a fight between two girls almost on the welcome mat to the aforesaid office. A 180 degree turn and the head assumed a position back behind their desk, office door closed.

It would be less funny if it wasn't true to be honest, and when you find out that this particular headteacher was paid around £100k per year, the taste of bile become difficult to ignore.

So what is their role? You know, I have very little idea if I'm honest and I have a feeling that the money could be better spent, but people expect them so I suppose we will just have to put up and shut up. Some can be very effective, and are headhunted for struggling academies, only to get sacked when results and behaviour don't improve. I suppose that they are the "face and voice" of a school, but unless the children know who they are, what real use are they?

All I really know is that I'll never be one, and that doesn't give me insomnia.

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.