It came as no surprise when a recent study found that performance-related pay has proved ineffective in the education sector.
It was an outcome predicted by unions long before the inception of PRP, and for very good reasons. The trouble with political and human resource management thinking is that it often invests too much belief in single strategies and mechanisms - academies to solve all education’s crises, for example.
Too little consideration is given to context: so, here are six reasons why performance-related pay isn’t just ineffective in raising performance, and rewarding and retaining teachers, but also damaging, too.
1. Context matters when measuring outcomes for the purposes of calculating rewards
Relating financial reward to performance is apparently highly successful in sales and marketing - but, fortunately for today’s youth, teaching is not quite the same thing.
In sales, the link between performance, outcome and reward is easier by far to define. The sales professional puts in a certain sales pitch and employs strategies in pursuit of profit for the individual and the company. The parameters are clear, and it is easy to see where success lies from the units sold and the price at which they were sold in a certain time period. It is assumed that all members of a sales team work under the same conditions and that the marketplace is open with no restrictions.
An over-simplified picture? Perhaps, but it does make clear the vast difference between the business world and the world in which teachers work.
Teaching has never been so easily quantified. Firstly, the opportunities to achieve a winning result are limited from the outset by the nature of our assessment system. Key stage 4 and 5 qualifications may seem to be reached through criteria-based judgements, but the whole of the cohort is norm-referenced. If one school wins and achieves results beyond the expected grades as predicated by Middle Years Information System, Alis and FFT, then it is inevitable that another one will lose. Not all students can get A* or grade 9s because the grade allocations do not permit it if a normal distribution curve is to be maintained. Ofqual and exam boards work in tandem to ensure that there should not be large bulges.
Even if there is a clear gain made by one department or one school, it is not possible to attribute the success solely to one teacher because a pupil’s education is an accumulation of all the 11 or 13 years of education - and an unquantifiable home input, let alone the personal qualities of the individual, level of effort and the genetic element which is now believed to be the most important factor in educational outcomes for pupils.
2. The reward has to be attainable and worth the effort expended
When I studied rewards management during my personnel/ human resources management course at postgraduate level, two of the key principles in making performance-related pay successful were that (i) the reward had to be attainable and (ii) the reward actually had to be available.
In schools and colleges, all too frequently these two conditions cannot be met.
As teachers know to their cost, the sums centrally made available in budgets are too small to make any rewards package viable. And large rewards to a small number of individuals come to the detriment of everyone else. It is hard to argue that one or two teachers in a school merit vastly more than their colleagues. Too many schools cannot even afford to give a cost-of-living pay rise. And deteriorating salaries have never been attractive in the jobs market - particularly for graduates who have student-loan debts amounting to £50,000-plus hanging over their heads.
Teachers need to be able to afford a decent, “grown-up” type roof over their heads. Student-style accommodation is only attractive when on a university course with plenty of time for distractions and a social life - not when working a 50-plus hour week. So pay is not only about an amount, but also what it can actually buy in the Brexit-world we are living in. In areas with high-cost, poor-quality housing, there are bound to be shortages of teachers for that very reason.
3. Those being rewarded the most may not necessarily be the best performers
Where there is a shortage of teachers of subjects, such as in mathematics and physics, schools make higher pay offers in order to staff the curriculum. Here, higher pay is not down to the efforts of the individual, it is down to the peculiar conditions of the marketplace. And as has been documented in the Tes cyber-pages, incentives can be very generous in comparison with the going rate. Unfortunately, such golden hellos have to be funded out of school budgets, limiting funds available to resource high performance from staff already in the job and performing above expectations.
4. Rewards have to fit the type of person achieving the measured outcomes
What works well in the financial and sales sectors of the economy doesn’t work in the education sector. Teachers themselves are altruistic, so attempts to govern their working behaviour by financial incentives are perverse. However, they are not saints. They do want a fair, living wage, and they do compare their salaries and conditions of employment with other graduate professions.
Perhaps the worst outcome from performance-related pay is that there are more losers than winners; and this means that so many good teachers will be disincentivised by the system now in place. The language in performance reports has to be couched in very objective terms so that no verbal praise that is not strictly merited for financial reward can be included. Attaching reward to praise makes the praise itself measurable financially. So how much is a “good” included in the report, for example? And if only performance is rewarded, then what do the levels of effort, the good intentions and the supportive behaviour of the teacher matter?
In the worst cases could the use of money become quite Pavlovian? That only certain actions are worthy of being undertaken because there is a direct financial consequence?
5. Performance-related pay skews other forms of reward
Perhaps the key reason performance-related pay fails in the education sector is that it demeans those who are judged by it. And it demeans those who have to make the judgments, those who have to mince their words, those who have to take care not to arouse any unreasonable expectations in case of an appeal. So words of recognition that mean so much to individuals are as short in supply as the cash from the treasury purse.
The use of targets - which are not necessarily the ones a teacher would choose - involves extra work, keeps attention firmly on outcomes and needs to be documented throughout the year. Where targets set by trusts and senior leaders are unrealistically high, the drive is higher still and teachers work far too hard for what is not realistically achievable. An unwanted side effect is increased anxiety, detrimental to mental health. And the final forms filled in by teacher and manager, which seem to change every year, take hours of professional and personal time to complete at the end of the year.
Perhaps performance-related pay in the armoury of human resources management contributes to “successful” performance of the business in limiting costs - not for nothing is it known as “pay rationing”. But the damage it is doing to the retention of good teachers and recruitment of promising recruits is incalculable.
A good wheeze implemented in the Govian era to save taxpayers’ money, implemented forcibly in the face of ethical opposition from teachers and their unions, is costing the profession its lifeblood and many children a good education.
Yvonne Williams is a head of English and drama in the south of England. Her wide-ranging article on the impact of changes to the review of marking and moderation will soon be published in the spring edition of The Use of English, the journal of the English Association.
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