Performance-related pay 'inevitable' for teachers

EVERY TEACHER will be able to aspire to a merit pay award under far-reaching plans for the future of the profession being prepared by the Government.

A Green Paper to be published next month will propose performance-related pay for teachers in return for an extra pounds 19bn for education over the next three years. Good teachers are expected to be offered more money after being appraised by their head teachers.

David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, promised yesterday that the Government would reward "a very substantial number" of the 440,000- strong profession for good teaching. He told a Fabian Society conference in London that the number who benefited would far exceed the 5,000 "superteachers" already announced who can earn up to pounds 40,000 a year.

Asked by a head teacher how he would choose which one of 10 excellent teachers should qualify, Mr Blunkett said: "We are not talking about one in 10. We are talking about a very substantial proportion of the profession being able to access high rewards."

Some teachers would not, for family reasons, be interested in the new awards and the Government would respect their decision.

Mr Blunkett called on teachers to stop resisting change and to accept that excellence must be rewarded as it was in other professions. "We know we can't afford, even if we wanted to, simply to hike everyone's salary at one go," he said.

He vigorously defended performance-related pay. "People say it's difficult to make judgements about whether there are good teachers. That's nonsense. Everyone who has been through school knows perfectly well who is a good teacher," he said. And he warned the teacher unions that industrial action over the Green Paper plans would be "silly".

"I haven't come across any trade union worth its salt that has gone on strike against more pay."

Doug McAvoy, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, suggested that industrial action by his members could not be ruled out. "There is a serious issue with performance-related pay. It sows seeds of division in the staffroom. We will continue to survey our members. We cannot tell what their response to the Green Paper will be. But we know that they say no to performance-related pay."

But Peter Smith, the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said that Mr Blunkett might find that teachers were much more imaginative about the proposals than he thought.

Standards in English have increased sharply in schools piloting the Government's new national literacy campaign.

Children at 20 schools in Bristol that have been running the prototype national literacy hour for two years have recorded an 8 per cent increase in national English reading tests for seven-year-olds.

The results showed an improvement four times greater than the 2 per cent increase achieved by schools that introduced the scheme only in September.

Now local authority leaders are hoping to see an increase in English scores for 11-year-olds when the national primary school league tables are published next year.