Assistant Principal - Pastoral Care

Performance Pay - No Meaningful Way

Periodically, governments and commentators pose the solution to rewarding deserving teachers through a system of performance pay, rather than a blanket pay rise for all - much like a bonus system used in the corporate world. Most teachers know it won’t work. Why?

For a start, what system of metrics or KPIs could you use to measure the performance of a teacher who is integral to maintaining the morale of colleagues? That person who remembers birthdays, who takes an extra class for a colleague who is struggling on a given day or does late bus duty for someone needing to rush off to the dentist or washes up the pile of plates left in the sink on a Friday afternoon? Is there a metric for being a decent human being?

More importantly, what about the teacher who notices a student in crisis when everyone else is oblivious and helps to usher them to support? Or the teacher who helps a young person grow in self belief, a belief that may not come to fruition for another five to ten years but through gentle pushing or urging or setting high expectations or that quiet word after class that affirms ‘I believe you can do this’, that has a transformational effect years later.

Boffins of course want to lean heavily on data from NAPLAN or the HSC. Any teacher who has marked NAPLAN will tell you it has become a hoop jumping exercise, a game that students have learned particularly where NAPLAN results are lauded and coveted. One of the best strategies students have been using in the writing component is to set their piece in a Spelling Bee Competition so that they can now demonstrate their ability to spell complex words. Create a system and people will learn how to game it, and kids are best at learning games.

HSC data is limited. Not all teachers work at this end of the cycle yet they may have been pivotal in how a student performs in Stage 6. In secondary school some teachers are well suited to transitioning primary students into a new learning environment while others work best with those challenging years from 8 to 10. Not to mention the work done at the primary level - how would you link back to the work done in Year 3 Maths to a student’s performance in the HSC? Every teacher plays a role but being able to discern whose performance was most significant is nigh impossible.

Then of course you could ask teachers to spend copious hours collating, annotating and documenting what a sterling job they do but as any teacher will tell you, effective teachers are selfless, not self serving, and that is exactly what such a process creates - people more interested in curating what they do rather than what students need. We have all experienced those in education who champion the latest pedagogical approach and through this process plump up their CVs and then disappear into the blue yonder far removed from the young people a teacher is called to serve while the pedagogical approach they championed withers or gathers dust in a store room with other fads.

The people who really know best about teacher performance are the students and, at times, their parents. No one knows better who impacts best on their growth as a learner than the learner themselves. But being placed in a position to have to assess the performance of the teacher in front of you is too much to ask of a young person - they have more than enough to navigate just with growing up.

Ultimately we are left with a much bigger question - how important is the education of our young people who are to become the future leaders and parents and workers? Where does it rank against the billions spent on building stadiums and tunnels and roadways that cut travel time by 15 minutes or car parks near railway stations or franking credits? Government spending represents the priorities of politicians and the electors who put them there. Highly skilled and capable nurses, police and paramedics are who we want most to help us when things go wrong and effective teachers are who we want to help our young become the best person they are capable of being so that our society continues to flourish and be productive. This will only happen if we pay them like our life depends upon it, because one way or another, it does. 

Mick Larkin - Assistant Principal - Pastoral