A few years ago, I considered performance management to be a good thing. Teachers should be held accountable for their results, of course. What on earth was I thinking?
How can we possibly be held accountable for things beyond our control? There are so many factors that contribute to a pupil’s success or failure: parental support, school behaviour systems (or lack of), institutional culture and pupil motivation to name but a few. It can, therefore, only be described as dishonest to claim that classroom teachers are solely responsible for pupil outcomes.
With this in mind, on Friday I entered my performance management meeting with a mixture of dread and resignation. According to the data, last year my Year 11 class under-performed, and, more to the point, according to the head’s implacable view, they did so because of me.
To be fair to my department head and line-manager, he appeared to sympathise and diligently noted my half-hearted attempts to defend my honour. It really is exhausting, though. I’ve lost the will to fight my corner and contextualise my results, I really have. I mean, why should I have to? They must know that I took on the class last September, surely, when I first arrived at the school. At that time, every single pupil was failing, miserably. Indeed, in our first mock exam in September, the class’s highest achieving pupil received a grade 2. And that was an exception, believe me. The rest were on 1s.
These kids were the most disillusioned and demoralised I’d ever encountered. But at the end of my nine-month stint with them, nearly every single one had measurably improved, notwithstanding the fact that my classroom had become a repository for kids my line manager - yes, him (no wonder he appeared to sympathise) - couldn’t cope with.
The problem with performance management
Earlier in the year, he transferred four kids from his class into mine - four kids on grade 1s. By the time they took their GCSEs, two of them achieved grade 4s and the other two, grade 3s. Another pupil went from a grade 1 in September to an incredible grade 5 in the summer exams.
But this doesn’t matter. The pupils’ targets - determined by their end of KS2 Sats data recorded five years earlier and calculated according to some unintelligible algorithm - were not met. And that’s the end of it. No attempt to empathise with my predicament. No acknowledgement of the failings of the previous four years - failings that saw these kids make little to no progress in the subject. Just a thoughtless, crass demand to effect five years of progress in just 9 months.
In hindsight, it’s my fault really. I should never have agreed to such an unrealistic and unrealisable target in the first place. But I was new and, as a newbie, I didn’t want to rock the boat. You live and learn. That said, I doubt they’d have listened anyway.
Yet even if my targets had been more achievable, these days, I still find the concept of performance management hard to stomach. How can I be held responsible for results largely determined by an education system dominated by a race to the bottom?
My results last year were achieved despite this. I daren’t say it to my line manager, though; he might pass it on to the big boss. She certainly won’t appreciate it. She’d rather berate me for missed targets.
Joe Baron is a pseudonym. The author is a history teacher in London
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