Last week shone a light on many of the problems besetting the education sector.
First, a Twitter storm blew up over the expectations listed in a job advertisement for an assistant headteacher, which said candidates would have to work “ridiculously hard” and be “wedded” to their job.
Then, a TUC analysis, based on Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) data, suggested that the gender pay gap in education is 22.2 per cent to the disadvantage of women.
Subsequently, a Tes analysis of multi-academy trust accounts revealed that most MATs with 25-plus schools increased the salaries of their (predominantly male) chief executives in 2021-22 - even as strenuous pay bargaining continued between the NEU and government for marginal pay gains.
While it is notable that education secretary Gillian Keegan is keen to include workload in negotiations to tackle the teacher recruitment and retention crisis, none of the solutions from the Department for Education workload reduction toolkit that she advocates has done more than trim the edges.
Workload, pay, long hours - these are big issues, and no wonder we have a recruitment and retention crisis when these are the headlines that the sector generates.
Clearly, then, something has to give - and tinkering around the edges is unlikely to be enough. The profession needs a radical rethink to address glaring faults in the system of determining fair pay, and to make teaching what the Independent Teacher Workload Review Group called “manageable, meaningful and motivating”.
If we are to do this, what we need first of all is a proper job evaluation of what teachers actually do.
Why teachers need job evaluation
The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) defines job evaluation as a “method of determining on a systematic basis the relative importance of a number of different jobs”.
Acas goes on to list factors that should trigger job evaluation: “lack of rationale for current grades … organisational change [which] has led to new job design … problems with recruitment and retention of employees … employee dissatisfaction with the way jobs are graded”.
All of these issues were considered in the latest report of the School Teachers’ Review Body, which highlighted how teachers have suffered from the impact of technological change on their working practices, being “required to offer face-to-face teaching to every age group whilst providing effective online learning for those pupils who are absent or isolating”.
Additionally, the STRB noted that “changes over recent years to the school landscape, including to workforce models and to elements of the existing pay framework” should mean that “a careful examination of the pay framework…to ensure its effectiveness” takes place.
Essentially, a comprehensive job evaluation would need to be carried out before any future pay framework constructed by the STRB would be fit for the purposes of “providing for clear progression, supporting different career pathways and more fully reflecting the range of teacher and leadership roles”.
How would job evaluation work?
How would job evaluation for teachers actually be carried out?
To make the outcomes of job evaluation fair and acceptable, a team of objective evaluators with no connection to particular schools or trusts would be needed and they would work to compile accurate, factual job descriptions for each role.
They would evaluate the job against a set of criteria - the “compensable factors” - which for roles in schools would include experience level, education qualifications, the extent to which the jobholder is exposed to confidential data, responsibility and the complexity of demands.
The evaluation exercise should address longstanding debates about whether managerial roles are more demanding and more valuable than classroom teaching; whether the skills deployed are more complex for managers; and whether the combination of teaching and management is fully rewarded.
Comparison between the boardroom and the classroom could be highly revealing.
The highest annual salary in 2021-22 for a MAT chief executive was £455,000 to £460,000, while the salary for a Level 1 teaching assistant is £18,729.
How could a differential whereby the highest earner gets 24 times as much as the lowest earner be justified in terms of effort, skill and confidentiality?
Such job evaluation would surely put an end to the grossly unfair situation whereby comparison with external roles pegs up MAT leaders’ pay, while affordability suppresses teachers’ salaries because any pay increase will come from hard-pressed school budgets, leaving teachers out of contention with graduates in similar jobs.
Fairness and transparency
Of course, the results of comparative job evaluation would be contentious for those who would lose salary, so there would have to be transparency about how data was collected for job descriptions, how it was evaluated to rank jobs on one single spine, and how pay differentials might be determined.
Job evaluation has to be consistent and thorough. Because there is a risk of substantial pay drops, some roles should be “red-circled”, meaning that salary at the former level would be paid during a transitionary period.
An appeals system is vital to challenge inconsistencies and ensure that no one is treated unfairly.
Acas offers brief advice on the scope of appeals and how they should be conducted. Trained advisers can offer impartial advice on how to ensure that job evaluation schemes are properly set up and appeals panels are effectively chaired.
The limitations of the outcomes
I am not suggesting that this is a perfect plan - job evaluation has its limitations. It could prove expensive in the time and costs involved in resourcing the investigation, and even more so in paying to implement its findings.
What’s more, it does not automatically include a remit to attribute pay to jobs once they have been ranked. Any outcome is only as good as the objectivity and transparency of its processes, and job evaluation can only achieve good judgements if the criteria are appropriate.
Ranking jobs may also not take account of the range of experience and nuance that individual teachers bring to the role. A teacher with 10 years’ experience being paid the same as one with three years’ would not feel fair to many.
Job evaluators would have to consider carefully whether there should be steps or adjustments within a pay grade to accommodate individuals fairly in a largely graduate profession.
Would the benefits outweigh the disadvantages?
A proper, structured, factual collation of what jobholders currently do could yield vital information about the impact of workload additions to the job over time.
Accountability, inspection, edtech innovation and curriculum change have transformed everyday practice in the classroom, adding considerably to the effort and ingenuity needed to carry out responsibilities effectively.
Scrutiny of tasks that impact heavily on workload could result in far-reaching change. The most obvious conclusion is that the classroom role is too large for anyone to do effectively under the current conditions - even with AI assistance.
The evidence collated could inform negotiations around improving pay and working conditions. Evaluating component parts would make it easier to agree nationally what tasks should be shrunk or even discarded, thus enabling school leaders to ditch unproductive practices in their own contexts.
Unfortunately, with affordability dominating pay negotiations, it is unlikely that even evidence from job evaluation of the exceptional skill and effort that teachers are routinely required to exert will be sufficient to sway the government to pay teachers their worth.
Therefore, the most tangible benefits of job evaluation to the whole system would be to end inconsistencies and reduce inequalities, especially as more men populate the leadership echelons and women the teaching roles.
Weighing managerial attributes against pedagogical ones, and looking at the combination of both in middle leadership roles, could lead to fewer bureaucratic tasks in the workload.
Perhaps job evaluation could even lead to better job design and ultimately keep more teachers in the classroom by ensuring that what they do is properly understood and that they are paid accordingly.
Yvonne Williams, who has been teaching for more than 30 years, was a member of the Department for Education Marking Policy Review Group, which looked at teacher workload in 2015-2016
