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.

"Below Average" Kids

I found this article on the BBC News website the other day: Click here!

What a bizarre story! It essentially says that those children who turn up at secondary school with below average grades, finish secondary school with below average grades. Thank you Sherlock, I'd never have guessed.

This is fairly typical of politicians who will never admit that some children aren't cut out for academia and may have talents in other areas, but due to the nature of education in the UK and it's academic focus, these children "under-achieve". What do you expect from teachers? They can't work miracles for all those "below average" students. Some do close the gap with enormous amounts of extra help from staff, but with average class sizes still at around 30 and funding being cut, the time that politicians suggest teachers devote to these children just isn't available.

If the time required to raise these children's attainment was afforded to them, those who had worked hard before entering secondary school would have to be ignored which would therefore have a detrimental effect on their grades. Once again teachers can't win and are chastised by those in suits as a result.

What is also ignored is that these children may not actually want to learn, whatever efforts are made. A lot depends on parental support, which in many cases isn't forthcoming as statistically these children tend to be from backgrounds where schooling wasn't seen as important. You'd be surprised at how many parents support their child's lack of application at school, making excuses for their child's lack of enthusiasm for learning.

I teach an intelligent lad who entered secondary school with above average grades but has since decided to enter the tattooing and piercing profession (which is fine) and, with the support of his parents, is convinced that he doesn't really need qualifications. Due to his natural aptitude towards learning and his knowledge gained up to this point he will probably leave school with the statutory 5 A* to C grades, but well below what he has been targeted by the algorithm schools use to generate targets. Whose fault will it be? Mine, and his other teachers despite the fact that this is a choice made by the child with the full support of his parents. This doesn't really seem fair to me, as all his teachers have tried to enthuse him with little or no success.

My other issue with this report is the fact that the statistics were released by the Department for Education, who would have ploughed thousands, if not millions of pounds into the frankly obvious findings of this research, and that money surely could have been used far more effectively elsewhere.

It got the government another headline though, I suppose, at the expense of teacher morale once more.

Academies - The Way Forward?

News has broken this week of an academy being accused of mismanagement. More precisely it's a group of academies, the second biggest in the country.

Academies, we are told in the teaching profession, are the way forward, and there are rumours that all schools will eventually be forced to become academies, with courses being held for schools' leadership to attend on how to become an academy. The theory behind schools becoming academies is this:

• Schools who become academies can plough their budgets into whatever they deem fit. Financial incentives can be made to prospective staff to encourage them to take the job, and presumably make them work harder. Academies don't have to adhere to the pay structure set out by maintained schools. Academies get money from the government but can use it in whatever way they think is most beneficial for their school. This seems a decent idea on the face of it. You would assume that a school's management would know best how to spend their money rather than be dictated to by a suit in Whitehall.
• Academies take over under-performing schools across the country and by offering better wages to staff, attract the "best" teachers who will turn those under-performing schools into beacons of education, a blue-print to be admired and drooled over by all. This also seems a decent idea in principal, as those students getting a raw deal in "failing" schools will get a better deal.
• Ultimately all schools will be encouraged to become academies because of the huge benefits of doing so. And who could blame them?

What actually happens is the following:

• All the money is spent on leadership and not very much is spent on the people who actually have to go and teach those "under-performing" children. This is what has happened at the MediaCity Oasis Academy in Salford, where 13 teaching staff are being made redundant in order to pay for the leadership team, many of whom I presume don't teach very much, if it's anything like any other school in the country. Many academy leadership teams are made up of old mates who pay themselves increasing amounts to do less and less. The only thing being that if the results don't meet expectations, those members of the leadership are out on their ear. We have a local academy whose headteacher was escorted off the premises and many senior staff are just being given a box to pack up their things. Make a deal with the devil people...
• The clientele, or "stock" as Ofsted like to call them, remain the same. It doesn't matter how many millions of pounds of public money are spent on new buildings, state-of-the-art facilities/resources and "the best teachers" in the land if those who are receiving that education are disaffected and have little or no interest in gaining qualifications because their parents hated school and have imposed their attitude towards education upon their offspring. You can polish a cowpat until it's so shiny you could do your hair in it, but ultimately it's still a cowpat.
• The number of "top quality" staff available to fill the posts falls well short of the number of posts to fill. There are lots of good teachers in the land but not all are up to it to be honest. You can't just magic up a replacement for a poor teacher over-night, and many don't want the extra stress that an increased wage can bring.
• If all schools become academies, the financial benefits of becoming one will be nullified as there's only so much money to go around.
• What isn't reported by the government is the fact that the main reason academies have appeared to make huge strides in raising achievement with their cohort is because loads of them are put on BTEC (or equivalent) courses which require little or no exams, but are mainly coursework which can essentially be dictated by the teachers and are worth 4 GCSE grades. This is changing so that a BTEC is going to be worth just 1 GCSE - I can't wait to see how the academies do then!
• The increased money paid to teaching staff needs to be earned (rightly so - you shouldn't expect to get more money for no extra work), so therefore those "top quality" staff end up burning out very quickly and either have lots of time off with stress (cover teachers will need paying) or will just leave the profession, because of stress (they will then need replacing with teachers who aren't as "high quality"). In some subjects, it's difficult to get mediocre teachers to fill posts.

Most educational policies that recent governments have pushed through are just designed to win votes and gain good press. Very few, if any actually encourage students to reach their potential in education, and just as importantly, although often forgotten, none of the policies make teaching a more manageable or desirable job. In fact, teaching is becoming an untenable job, as increased interference and demotivation become serious issues in the profession.

Article here!

The Top 100 State Secondary Schools

The Sunday Times this week has four lists:

• The Top 100 Independent Secondary Schools.
• The Top 100 Prep Schools (Independent Primary Schools to you and me).
• The Top 100 State Primary Schools.
• The Top 100 State Secondary Schools.

There will be parents across the land scouring the list to see if a school near to where they live is featured, particularly in the state sector. The trouble is that the state lists ought to come with a "health warning".

What do I mean by that?
It means that the table is not really showing what most people will expect it to show, and that is a true comparison of all state schools around the country.

The secondary list is not a level playing field, and just a quick glance at the names of the schools will tell you that. The word "comprehensive" doesn't feature at all, but the word "grammar" features in well over half the list; interestingly the word "academy", the flagship of recent governements only appears once, and not until number 89. This means that most, if not all the schools in that top 100 are heavily selective of the children who join their ranks through the 11+ exams. They are essentially independent schools without the fees, where the 11+ exam replaces the common entrance (the exams children sit to qualify for independent school).

Many state secondary secondary schools don't have the "luxury" of selection, they are known as "comprehensive schools", doing exactly what they say on the tin by offering a comprehensive education for the whole community. Grammar schools don't exist in many parts of the country, so schools in those areas don't feature in the list at all, unsurprisingly. I teach in one of the many areas that doesn't have the grammar system, and to be honest I'm not totally against the system, but that's another post altogether, which now the seed has been planted, will happen fairly shortly.

All that tables like these do is demoralise those who don't work in the schools featured in the lists. They make you feel inadequate even though you have little or no hope of actually competing. The teaching profession is already plumbing a morale trough with the pensions debate and various other policy issues and biased articles like this only deepen the gloom.

Why can't the media and politicains/education agencies actually tell the truth about school?. A more accurate league table would be one that shows what is known as "value added" data, i.e. schools that improve a child's grades the most during their time at the school. This would allow all secondary schools to have a chance to appear on the list rather than just the privileged few.

But that would make sense of course.

You Can Lead A Horse To Water...

You can hold its head under to force it to drink but you’ll either annoy or drown it. Targets are the bane of a teacher’s life. Target grades or levels are predicted using a graph based on what they’ve done in previous exams, as well as other stuff like whether they are entitled to free school meals. In theory a child can take a key stage 1 exam at the age of 7 and from that level you can predict what they are going to get up until GCSE when they are 16.

This system is flawed for various reasons, but once a target has been generated it’s very difficult to change, especially downwards, although it is very easy to move it upwards. Schools are given targets of A* to C grades by the local authority which they have to try and meet, with improvements year on year so that the government can say that standards are rising.

The problem is that the predicted grades are only really accurate for 50% of children, meaning that they aren’t accurate for 50%. This is not so widely known, but appears to have little bearing on local authority battering of school senior management, who in turn batter heads of department, who in turn batter teachers.

When a teacher receives the target grades for their class in the first year of GCSE they can usually tell within a few weeks whether the child is capable of reaching that grade. As standards are being forced up centrally, target grades seem to get more and more unreachable, therefore demoralising students and teachers alike.

There is also the fact that a C grade is regarded as a pass (all grades are regarded as a pass, but C and above are seen as “proper” passes). The child who has no intention of taking mathematics, or any other core subject such as English, beyond GCSE level will therefore be happy with a C grade, whatever their target may be. The amount of times that a teacher hears “I’m don’t need maths for what I’m going to do” is depressing, and most students don’t realise that for almost every job application you need to put down what you got in English and Maths at GCSE or equivalent.

Strangely enough English and Maths always struggle to hit their targets as every student has to take the subject whether they like it or not, whereas the subjects the students choose, or their options, tend to hit their targets because the students actually chose it and it would reasonable to assume, enjoy that subject.

The longer my teaching career has gone on, the less motivating targets have become from both sides of the desk. The students are expected to know what their targets are in each subject (Ofsted will ask apparently), but generally make little effort to achieve it. And who can blame them? If you know your target is very tough and almost insurmountable, most will not bother. There will always be a occasional child who will have a go but not expect to achieve it – if they do, it’s a bonus.

The main problem is that children and their ever changing attitude to their own education are not an exact science, means that predictions are always going to be flawed. It seems that predicted grades are here to stay, but at least make them realistic.