About those teachers striking...

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As you know I don't like it and see it as counterproductive - worse striking undermines the idea of teaching as a professional vocation. More to the point, the Unions are dressing the dispute up as something far grander than it is in reality:

“The teachers who marched are not political activists, they are here for education and are concerned about young people entering the profession and their future.

“This has been a very important show of solidarity, the two unions represent 90 per cent of all teachers, and we are standing up for education.” 

If the strike is about policy rather than the self-interest of teachers then, if my understanding is right, it is illegal. So it isn't about that at all:

We are asking that he establishes a series of meetings with the NUT and NASUWT, chaired by himself to address the issues under dispute and that he suspends the implementation of the changes proposed to the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document, pending the outcome of these discussions. We are also asking that he publish the valuation of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme conducted on the basis of the 2010 criteria and factors.

Not about children at all. Nor is it about qualifications. Or free schools. Or academies. Or indeed the education policies of the government. It's absolutely and specifically about the proposed changes to teachers' pay and conditions.

And those pay and conditions result from the recommendations of an independent body - the School Teachers' Review Body. This body has proposed:

The STRB has recommended an increase of 1% from September 2013 in the values of:

• all points on the unqualified, main and upper pay scales for classroom teachers (including main scale points which will be discretionary reference points for pay decisions thereafter)
• the minimum and maximum of the pay range for leading practitioners and all pay ranges for individual posts set before taking account of the September 2013 uplift
• all points on the leadership pay spine
• any individual allowances in payment and to the minima and the maxima of the ranges of all teacher allowance

Get that folks - the STRB is proposing a pay increase! And - wait for it - the government has "...accepted all of the key recommendations in the report." Plus there's a consultation period with the Unions and other relevant partners running for a month.

What the teachers' unions want is for the government to ignore the recommendations of an independent body (and not one of recent invention either) to impose a more favourable settlement - one using up more of that precious resource going to schools.

Either that or the 'dispute' is simply a canard and this really is a political strike and not a genuine dispute.

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For one time only...I agree with the NUT - payment by results for teachers is a daft idea

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...on teachers' performance pay. The proposals "from MPs" should the sort of appreciation of reward structures that gave us over-paid useless bankers:

Schools minister Nick Gibb said the government has asked the school teachers' review body – which considers matters relating to teachers' pay, duties and working time – to make recommendations on introducing "greater freedoms and flexibilities" in teachers' pay, including how to link it more closely to performance.

And the chosen measure is something called "added value" - which is a pretty discredited metric and was designed anyway to assess whole school performance over several years not individual teacher performance over one year. And in the USA where teacher 'ratings' are widely used, there's precious little evidence that these act to raise overall educational outcomes (which is, I guess, the whole point of the exercise).

The relatively simple 'appraisal bar' approach that already exists in the pay scales should be adequate and, more to the point, the decisions as to reward should fall to school management teams not be set by some bunch of bureaucrats down in Whitehall. And certainly not in response to a report from a bunch of MPs.

There's no doubt that schools find getting rid of underperforming teachers quite difficult but not giving them a pay rise isn't going to make them either leave or perform better. Do we really think that the teacher stood in front of a class is thinking; "I'll be extra good here and I'll get a pay rise or a bonus"? Of course they aren't and if they were, we would be a little worried about their vocation for the job.

School heads know who are the good and bad teachers - we just need to give them the "freedoms and flexibilities" to manage. And more complicated and often misleading performance measurement will just cost money without raising standards.

And in the end Christine Blowers (for once) is right:

Payment by results is total nonsense. Children are not tins of beans and schools are not factory production lines. Successful schools rely on a collegiate approach and team working.

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