Should NHS workers get a pay rise?

rustybin

But that's not part of any teacher's performance management.

How would you judge a Primary school teacher's pay on how many of the class they teach end up at Oxbridge 15 years later? That would make no sense.

nheather

My wife is a teacher and from what she has told me that isn't true.  She tells me that there is a performance related element but that it is just a small perturbation.  The main change is the move up to the next rung which is time-served.

Cheers,

Nigel

Jezza99

And therein lies the big lie that teachers pay is in anyway "performance" linked.

Called me old fashioned, but to me the performance of a teacher should be judged by the academic attainment of the pupils they teach. The public sector's idea of "performance management" is laughable.

rustybin

School Governors were given the freedom by Gove to set their own pay structures and performance management policies. I'm not saying your wife is wrong, I'm saying that every single school is now different.

If you wife's school has money to burn and is willing to give teachers more money regardless of performance, good luck to it and well done to your wife for working there.

nheather

I'd say that Private Schools pay more because they want to attract the best teachers - because they need good results at all levels so they can continue to attract paying customers.  Yes a higher proportion will go onto Oxbridge but that is only part of their marketing.

Cheers,

Nigel

rustybin

That makes up 1/3 of many teachers' PM (as I say, it varies in every single school now). For me 1/3 is related to my Leadership and 1/3 related to their overall contribution to the school.

The final one is a little woolly, but you have to put a case together. The first 2/3 are numbers based and there's no getting away from it.

However, they ARE all discretionary (from the Governors) - so if you miss your academic outcomes you can make an argument that you should pass anyway (eg - the one child who didn't make it went off to Hungary for 7 weeks and missed half a term).

nheather

It doesn't have money to burn - in fact it is one of those in West Sussex that is getting proporionately less budget than other schools - to the extent that there was talk of moving to a 4 day week.

I'll ask her tonight, but I thought the rungs in the ladder were very much in place.  In fact if you google you can see the grade bands, rungs and salary at each rung - are you saying that they are not used any more.

Cheers,

Nigel

Jezza99

Which just proves my point. It's all woolly, none of it relates to basic outcomes, and it can easily be fiddled anyway.

When Gove tried to introduce the concept of performance related pay, teachers and the Unions squealed like stuck pigs because they knew full well that a true performance pay system would expose all the time serving chair warmers, who get pay increases for just turning up (when they are not on their extended holidays of course).

rustybin

They are used, but you only get up a rung in the ladder IF you pass your PM. Schools only have a finite amount of money, and in practice, if EVERY teacher passed their PM every year, schools would go bankrupt.

This is lie of PM in schools - if (and to be fair, it is a massive if as there are lots of crap teachers) every teacher in the country met their targets, there would be a massive black-hole, because from a business POV, success for a school doesn't = more money. Paradoxically, the better teachers do, the less money a school has as teacher salaries are funded from the school budget, not centrally.

rustybin

No - what happened was that Gove wanted private sector style PM system introduced but didn't have a clue how to implement it, so he left it up to every individual Governing body. As such Governors can set policies which fit their schools.

In my experience it mostly works pretty well given the massive variations at play. I've yet to hear of a better way of doing things anyway.

By far the best thing Gove did was allowing PM to be directly linked to capabilities, meaning it's so much easier to get rid of crap teachers - often far quicker than in the Private Sector. Unfortunately, crap teachers are better than no teachers, and there's such a massive lack of quality coming through that some schools may choose to stick with what they know rather than having to go down the supply route (which is mainly made up of crap teachers).

Rock and a hard place.