Performance-related pay for teachers has never added up

It’s nothing more than an insult to hard-working teachers and a bureaucratic nightmare that wastes schools’ precious time. It’s right they get rid of it, writes James Moore

The government has decided to end performance related pay in schools (PA)

How do you assess empathy? How would you create a metric against which to measure it in someone’s job performance?

Performance-related pay for teachers (upon which the curtain will soon be drawn) was surely an idea dreamed up in a politician’s office, without any apparent understanding of the jobs they do – or of the importance of qualities the best teachers possess in abundance.

Want to know how worthwhile a child’s teacher really is? Just ask the parents. They’ll soon tell you how readily they go the extra mile, how happy their son or daughter is at school, how much (or little) they’re improving. Don’t believe me? Just take a peek in any school WhatsApp group.

It’s probably fair to say that teachers – same goes for nurses and many others in the public sector – are motivated by something different, say, to those in the City, working all hours to bring home six-figure bonuses. Those top-drawer salaries simply aren’t there. Your average primary school class teacher knows that – it isn’t what drives them. So, the attempt to reward teachers for their “performance” was never going to work. It was doomed from the start.

And thus, it became a largely bureaucratic exercise. Teachers would end up spending far too much time engaged in box ticking and form filling in an attempt to prove they were simply doing their jobs – time that would be much better spent actually teaching.

So, the news that this particular painful pay measure is to be scrapped couldn’t be more welcome. With schools now facing acute shortages, this reform is long overdue. The Times Educational Supplement (TES) recently warned that “England is slowly running out of teachers” leaving schools “stuck in a vicious cycle of low recruitment and high attrition”. The government has, meanwhile, missed its recruitment target by a third.

The result is a slow burn crisis, which has mostly played out away from public view. Some schools have, for example, been forced to institute early closing or a four-day week due to a lack of staff.

It is against this troubled backdrop that the Department for Education’s Workload Reduction Taskforce has published its initial proposals, the centrepiece of which is calling time on the idea of performance-related pay.

At the beginning of the report, schools minister Damian Hinds says: “We recognise members’ concerns around the administrative and workload burden of Performance-Related Pay (PRP) and its impact on teaching and learning.”

The government has thus accepted the recommendation that PRP be scrapped and “replaced with a less bureaucratic way to manage performance fairly and transparently”.

Teacher leaders could still be forgiven for wondering if they’re dreaming at this point. They’ve spent years rightfully complaining about the bureaucracy of performance pay, and protesting the 60 to 80-hour weeks that can result from it – as if you can somehow put a figure on Ms Lee spending a couple of hours after school imparting the idea that algebra isn’t as scary as it looks, or Mr Lenoir putting going the extra mile to show that French irregular verbs are possible to get to grips with if you take it one step at a time.

Teaching is just not the same as other professions. You can’t create a spreadsheet which shows Mr Perkins’ performance relative to Ms Khan’s, as you would if they were both members of a sales team. This is why PRP was little more than an exercise in wasting the time of all concerned.

The pity is it has taken the government as long as it has to wake up to this fact. It’s not as if the problem of teacher workloads is anything new.

“A positive step” is how the National Education Union, the National Association of Headteachers and the Association of School and College Leaders described the PRP decision in a joint statement. Indeed it is. It is refreshing to see ministers engaging constructively with the sector’s problems.

We’ve also seen a welcome change of tone from Ofsted, which seems to be waking up to the damage it has caused.

But more is required, not least on the subject of pay. No one goes into teaching to get rich, but pay has declined sharply in real terms. No wonder teachers are fleeing for other professions.

I’m aware that boosting teachers’ pay involves fighting with the Treasury. But isn’t that what education secretary Gillian Keegan is there for? She and her team still have some homework to do before they deserve anything like a passing grade. Parents have set a deadline – and it is looming.