The government has today pledged to scrap performance-related pay (PRP) progression amid concerns about the workload burden it creates for teachers and school leaders.
The Department for Education (DfE) said it would conduct a “rapid government and trade unions review of current guidance” to ensure a replacement for PRP is in place from 1 September.
It comes after the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) last year recommended that “the existing obligation on schools to operate PRP progression should be withdrawn, pending further work”, and calls from the education unions to have the requirement withdrawn.
The DfE has today also published the initial recommendations made by the workload reduction “task force”, which was commissioned to look at how to cut five hours from teachers’ working week.
In a response published alongside the recommendations today, the DfE said that it wanted to ensure that “school leaders are able to support, develop and reward their staff in the least burdensome way”.
“We accept the recommendation that the requirement for PRP should be removed and replaced with a less bureaucratic way to manage performance fairly and transparently.”
PRP was introduced to create a direct link between teacher pay and performance.
However, not everyone fully supported the decision to scrap it. James Zuccollo, director for school workforce at the Education Policy Institute, said research has shown that PRP requirements have created an “additional administrative burden for schools”, but that the decision to scrap it “must not constrain headteachers’ ability to reward and retain their best teachers”.
Mr Zuccollo said this was particularly important given that “average pay across the profession continues to fall further behind that of other graduate professions”.
The DfE has said that by communicating any changes in spring 2024, schools “will have sufficient notice to enable them to prepare during the summer for September 2024 implementation”.
The DfE has also “fully considered remitting the STRB to include an additional, workload-focused Inset day”, adding that it did not feel that a further Inset day was the right course of action.
As part of its initial work, the workload task force was asked to make rapid recommendations on two areas: updating and reinserting the previously removed list of administrative tasks that do not require the professional skills of a teacher into the school teachers’ pay and conditions document and strengthening the implementation of the 2016 independent workload review groups’ recommendations, as well as maximising sign-up to the education staff wellbeing charter.
The task force will now make its final recommendations to the government, Ofsted, and school and trust leaders by the end of March.
The group is expected to consider a number of priorities, including the unintended consequences of accountability, technological solutions, parental expectations and complaints, and the impact of pressures on wider public services on schools.
The DfE has published a draft of an updated list of administrative tasks that should not be undertaken by teachers and to once again clarify the expectations of Ofsted in order to reduce what it deems unnecessary work.
The department has also accepted the recommendation that it should “commit to enhancing knowledge and accessibility of the school workload reduction toolkit”.
Research last year found that fewer than one in 10 senior leaders had found the toolkit useful.
In a joint statement, the general secretaries of school leaders’ union the NAHT, the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) and the National Education Union (NEU), said: “We are pleased that the task force’s initial set of recommendations has been accepted. We particularly welcome the news that the government will be removing the obligation for schools to use performance-related pay from September.”
ASCL’s Geoff Barton, the NAHT’s Paul Whiteman and the NEU’s Daniel Kebede said in the joint statement that it had become “increasingly clear” that the PRP system “drives unnecessary workload and bureaucracy for leaders and teachers alike”.
“We will now work closely with the DfE to ensure that any updated guidance replacing it is fit for purpose and reduces workload burdens,” the unions said.
