‘Hands Off My Pay Rise!’ – How Performance-Related Pay Turns Us All Into Competitors
The Primary Head considers whether performance-related pay is transforming once noble teachers into scheming rivals… Just how much competition is there in schools? More importantly, how much competition should there be? ‘Well, we shouldn’t expect children to feel as though they’re competing in the Hunger Games, but how are we preparing them for the cruel […]
The Primary Head considers whether performance-related pay is transforming once noble teachers into scheming rivals…
Just how much competition is there in schools? More importantly, how much competition should there be? ‘Well, we shouldn’t expect children to feel as though they’re competing in the Hunger Games, but how are we preparing them for the cruel world of failed interviews, mortgage rejections and their future partner’s infidelity if we don’t allow them to finish last during the odd sports day?…‘
Ah, I think you may have got the wrong end of the stick. I was talking about competition amongst staff…
Disgruntled union clamour
Now, hold on there – we’re not a grubby business! Teachers don’t operate within a cut-throat world of self-advancement at the cost of their colleagues. Teaching is a noble and selfless profession. Well, maybe on the surface. But you don’t need to dig all that deeply to find plenty of opportunities for competition. Take, for example, Performance Related Pay (PRP). This, for want of a better term, ‘added bonus’ to the world of teaching is relatively new, but it brings with it an entirely new layer of competition.
The idea? Prove your performance is above a set level of expectations and you get paid; prove you’re working significantly above the expected level, and get paid even more. And if you’re unable to do this? You don’t get a pay rise – or worse, you come to know the capability procedure in more detail than Facebook’s privacy terms and conditions.
There was a lot of disgruntled union clamour when PRP was introduced in schools; it threw up an uncomfortable and often unspoken issue within teaching. Whisper it, but some poor performing teachers have been getting away with it for years. (Or so the government at the time would have the public believe.)
Schools were told to rewrite their pay policies to reward good teachers and flush out the shirkers. Automatic increments on the main pay scale were duly tweaked. Some divided each increment into two – an automatic – albeit smaller – rise, with the other half to be ‘earned’ through a successful appraisal.
In reality, this meant teachers and good senior leaders began to care more about performance management, resulting in staff receiving more support and in turn getting the pay rise they would have got before PRP was implemented. Confused yet?
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Plenty at stake
Well, what about the schools where it’s possible for fantastic teachers to leapfrog pay points? Is it unfair for an NQT to jump up a few notches and overtake a mediocre M2 teacher? Doesn’t this just encourage unhealthy competition between colleagues?
It shouldn’t. In theory, an individual’s performance has nothing to do with anyone else’s and should be judged in isolation – but schools do not have an endless supply of money. They cannot afford for every teacher to earn accelerated pay rises, so how do you decide where to allocate funds unless you start making comparisons? What choice is there but to inadvertently pitch teacher against teacher?
There’s plenty at stake for the people leading the appraisals, too. Their performance (and promise of a bigger pay rise) rests in part on their ability to get more teachers performing at a higher standard. Never mind the Hunger Games – pretty soon we’ll see schools where Macbeth is trying to topple Darth Vader by smothering him under Cruella de Vil’s fur coat…
Of course, this (probably) doesn’t happen, because teachers are inherently good people, senior leaders aren’t that stupid, and more importantly, the school business manager simply wouldn’t allow it.
But the introduction of PRP has opened the door for teachers to view themselves as competitors. They compete with themselves to do better than the previous year, compete with each other to win the ‘mega pay rise of the year’ award and compete against the system itself. Whichever way you look at it, the world of educations is becoming increasingly competitive.
The Primary Head is the moniker of a headteacher currently working in a UK primary school. Follow him at @theprimaryhead
