It’s that time again: the annual appraisal cycle rolls around with depressing regularity. We all scrabble through our files, trying desperately to track down the bit of paper that tells us what it was we said we would do last year, and hope that we can come up with enough evidence to get through the process.

Well, maybe that’s a cynical view, but if it’s done badly, it’s easy to end up with this tokenistic approach. I remember, as a young teacher, having to ask my year leader for a copy of my appraisal statement to remind myself what my targets were: they clearly hadn’t been at the forefront of my mind throughout the year.

In those days, it seemed to be mostly about extra tasks. One year I had the task of replanning the science curriculum, another was creating a set of maths investigation tasks. They were standalone tasks that had been shared amongst the team. They were easy to check at the end of the year: either they were done, or they weren’t.

Then came the data. Rightly, the focus shifted to what was going on in the classroom, but unfortunately it seemed to be associated only with numbers, and the dreaded SMART targets (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound objectives). Somehow, the wretched acronym has become all-important, whether it’s for trainee teachers’ observation feedback or whole-school development plans. With the result that if it can’t have a number attached, it isn’t worth doing.

Appraisals: ‘You can’t put a number on everything’

Of course, it’s ridiculous. Not everything we do in schools can be simplified to a measurable outcome - and even if it can, that doesn’t mean we should. If one of the priorities of a school is to raise children’s awareness of staying safe online, does it really improve things to say that every teacher will teach 10 e-safety lessons? Or that 70 per cent of children will give an appropriate answer in a survey?

The same is true at the individual teacher level. By all means have a whole-school focus on a particular area, but if you set targets for every class and every subject, what impact do you hope it will have? I never really understood what I was meant to do with my target of 76 per cent or whatever it might be. Was I meant to teach particularly better that year?

If we really stick with SMART targets, how do we set a specific and measurable target for the intangibles? If your school wants to develop its middle leaders, what do you measure? If you want to improve the quality of teaching, do we have to return to grading individual lessons so we have something to measure?

That’s before we even start on the A and R. What do they stand for anyway? Do objectives need to be attainable and realistic? Isn’t that the same thing? Or maybe it’s achievable and relevant. But then, relevant to what? And if it’s irrelevant, why are we even talking about it?

Interestingly, the origins of the whole SMART business seems to stem from a journal article that’s almost as old as I am. When George Doran first proposed the model, he also went to some lengths to clarify that it wouldn’t be useful for all objectives. Indeed, he specifically points out that it might be inappropriate for middle managers as you lose the benefits of a more abstract objective.

Maybe then, this year, as you sit down to set targets for yourself or one of your team, perhaps the smart thing to do would be to ditch SMART targets altogether and focus instead on the stuff that really matters - measurable or not!

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979