Damian Hinds should be applauded for putting his political weight behind the Department for Education’s Eliminating Unnecessary Workload initiative. He understands the connection between the excessive and sometimes unreasonable demands on teacher time, teacher frustration and stress, and the loss of teachers to the profession. Unfortunately, if his main objective is to retain teachers, he doesn’t grasp the contradiction between this direction and the limitations he is imposing on the School Teachers’ Review Body.
Perhaps, as a politician, accountable to the public for the ways in which taxpayers’ money is spent, he can’t appear too generous. Also, in the context of spending on public services, there is political pressure to be as “efficient” as possible - which usually means keeping the wage bill down whilst getting the most out of the employees.
However, he overlooks the fact that, for a number of years, the government and the public have been getting quite extraordinary value for the money in terms of teachers’ hours and the “delivery” of hugely time-consuming reforms.
If only there were a financial equation between reforms and rewards.
The difficulty with asking for improved productivity in the public sector, and in teaching, in particular, is that it’s a very difficult thing to measure. In a factory, improved productivity simply means more widgets. It may mean longer hours and more effort. If increased quantity and longer hours were the single measurement of productivity then teachers’ pay should have received a massive hike years ago.
Highly-lauded intensifiers of teachers’ time and effort like deep marking, data-input, and detailed weekly lesson plans actually stand in the way of a better product.
Mr Hinds would be well-advised to place even more emphasis on reducing the “gold-plating” rather than looking to salary manipulation to improve productivity.
Higher productivity cannot mean more high grades and more students making it over the “pass” and the “good pass” at GCSE. In an examination system dictated by a normal distribution curve, there must be losers in one extreme of the curve. If the tail gets smaller the immediate criticism would be that grade inflation is happening. In fact, the efforts of the qualifications watchdog ensure that the grade boundaries are usually kept at a predetermined proportion. That is the nature of norm-referenced qualifications.
Thanks to more enlightened thinking on the differences between “performance” and real learning, we are aware that the product of teaching is far less easily defined. All the improvements in test scores and comments in class discussion, the essays and even the exam grades could simply be down to artificial boosts. Strategies like scaffolding may simply bring about improved performance rather than deeper learning.
A pedagogical “product” defies definition and accurate measurement in these terms. And, unfortunately, increases in productivity can mean only one other thing: greater “efficiency” in the system in terms of larger classes, more teaching time and less support.
Recent protests by heads and the evidence presented in the BBC’s School fly-on-the-wall documentary show the effects of cuts on the quality of education. We’ve seen heart-breaking discussions centre on redundancies of loyal, hard-working staff. We’ve also seen how they struggle to manage without the behavioural support that so many schools have used effectively in the past to keep pupils in school and benefiting from the education on offer.
Already schools are having to increase class sizes to balance budgets. The future looks pretty bleak if the implicit expectation of “improvements to productivity” is that those increases should continue. The meagre financial reward will not offset the stress and longer hours that additional students bring.
“Flexibility” in the pay structure (the unequal distribution of money to teachers who all work very hard) is simply tinkering at the margins: it is not a solution to the retention problem.
Damian Hinds is not asking the right questions. He is entrenched in the managerial thinking that has placed the conservation of financial assets over the reward that teachers deserve for what they give to the system.
Ingratitude on the part of the government is not an attractive quality.
There should be more money in the pot in an equitable salary structure that fairly rewards all for their extra industry and the improvements they have wrought. Implementing this now would be good for retention.
He might also change the rhetoric to include important concepts such as reward and recognition. These aren’t always the salary inflators that he and the government might fear. People like to be appreciated.
He could and should be fighting fire with fire. If he genuinely wants “improvements to productivity” and to retain teachers then he should look to schools to become much more efficient in the way in which teachers’ hours are spent.
Efficiency should mean radical reduction of unproductive bureaucracy and the elimination of “gold-plating” to facilitate improved productivity - and that should mean better learning in the classroom, not better “performance”. Teachers find teaching much more intrinsically-rewarding than filling in spreadsheets.
As a mere middle leader, I don’t have the wherewithal to offer champagne or even Liebfraumilch as an incentive to implement my advice.
Commensurately though, I could raise a glass bottle of Highland Spring Water. It may lack the intoxicating glamour of the grape product; but it’s environmentally sustainable, healthy and very good at flushing out the toxins from the body.
Yvonne Williams is a head of English and Drama in the south of England
