And yet, for purely due to political whim, teachers’ pay progression is being directly linked to the outcomes for the children they teach. This is happening even though it is well-established that the biggest influence on GCSE performance is prior attainment at Key Stage 2. Over time, those who teach children with higher prior attainment will receive higher pay and those who teach children with lower prior attainment will receive lower pay.
If teachers want a pay rise each year to keep up with inflation, they should, if they are able to act entirely out of self-interest, chose to teach more able children, and avoid teaching in schools with children with lower-than-average prior attainment
In the midst of a growing retention and recruitment crisis, is this sensible policy? Teachers should be encouraged to enable their pupils to make the best progress they can, but any link between pupil progress and teaching should be brought to an end before too many teachers opt to avoid secondary schools catering for lower attainers.
A misguided policy
The coalition government introduced a direct link between teacher’s ‘performance’ and their pay in 2013. This was part of a dismantling of national pay agreements which had previously been in place, and was driven by assumptions based on the ideas that ‘lazy teachers hold children back’ (the Lazy Bums hypothesis, as Eric Kalenze memorably calls it) and that ‘bad teachers’ deserved to be paid less than ‘great teachers’.
Previously, national agreements saw teachers’ pay rise in each of their first six years, with established teachers receiving inflation-matching pay increases each year. It was argued that this did not reward the ‘best teachers’, and did not therefore encourage teachers to teach well.
“Schools will, from 1 September 2013, be able to link teachers’ pay to performance allowing them to pay good teachers more. It is up to each school to decide how best to implement new pay arrangements – and each school must make the link between pay and performance clear.”
In the brave new world schools are theoretically free to ‘decide how best to implement new pay arrangements’. The government suggested that schools could consider a number of factors “when assessing teachers’ performance. This includes a teacher’s:
- impact on pupil progress
- impact on wider outcomes for pupils
- contribution to improvements in other areas (eg pupils’ behaviour or lesson planning)
- professional and career development
- wider contribution to the work of the school, for instance their involvement in school business outside the classroom
Enter Ofsted, taking a narrow view of goverement policy
Either knowingly or not, Ofsted judges schools based on their pupils' results. In addition, Ofsted does not seem to understand that prior attainment, rather than teaching, is the main driver of academic attainment. As a result, it is much easier to be judged to have acceptable pupil outcomes with more able pupils than it is to do so with pupils who are not as able.
This is clear at primary level, although measures of prior attainment can be skewed by factors which area not taken into account – age, parental support, poverty, ambition, drive and so on. At secondary level, by which time the twin battering rams of prior attainment and comparative outcomes split schools into two clear groups, the picture is much more clear.
Here are some recent Ofsted reports of schools rated inadequate.
(For the 2015 cohort, national mean for Low Attainers (Below Level 4) was 17%, Median Attainers (Level 4) was 50%, high attainers (Above Level 4) was 23%. Key Stage 2 Average Point Score was 27.5.)
All Saints Academy Dunstable, 20% Low Attainers, 26.6 KS2 APS
Alfreton Grange Arts College, 27% Low Attainers, 26.0 KS2 APS
Buttershaw Business and Enterprise College, 21% Low Attainers, 26.8 KS2 APS
David Young Community Academy, 21% Low Attainers, 26.5 KS2 APS
Laisterdyke Business and Enterprise College, 29% Low Attainers, 25.7 KS2 APS
Seaton Burn College, 15% Low Attainers, 26.9 KS2 APS
The Dean Academy, 13% Low Attainers, 27.3 KS2 APS
In contrast, here are the schools recently graded Outstanding:
Birkenhead High School Academy 5% Low Attainers, 29.0 KS2 APS
Sir John Cass Foundation and Redcoat Church of England Secondary School 10% Low Attainers, 28.3 KS2 APS
Wilmington Grammar School for Girls 0% Low Attainers, 31.3 KS2 APS
In each of these schools, Ofsted has their praised the schools for linking teachers’ pay to the outcomes achieved by their pupils, or demanded that this should happen.
This is despite the government’s own advice that teachers’ pay should not be limited in this way, and should take into account a range of factors:
- impact on pupil progress
- impact on wider outcomes for pupils
- contribution to improvements in other areas (eg pupils’ behaviour or lesson planning)
- professional and career development
- wider contribution to the work of the school, for instance their involvement in school business outside the classroom
In insisting that teacher's pay should be linked directly to 'impact on pupil progress' and ignoring the other factors listed above, Ofsted is enforcing a narrow interpretation of the government's whimsical policy. This misguided approach should be abandoned before it does any more damage to schools which struggle to attract teachers as it is. Policy makers should reconsider the perverse incentives linking pay to pupil progress is having, and reward those who teach well, whomever they teach.