Yesterday, the inquiry conducted by the Education Committee on the recruitment, training and retention of teachers was released, sparking immediate reactions from all sides. But of all the recommendations, the proposition of performance-related pay for the teachers has attracted particular attention.
To justify its recommendation, the Committee based its arguments on research, conducted by the Centre Market and Public Organisation, which showed that “having an ‘excellent’ teacher compared with a ‘bad’ one can mean an increase of more than one GCSE grade per pupil per subject“. Therefore, the Committee has come to the conclusion that the pay system should support and reward the strongest teachers and “make no excuses (or, worse, incentives to remain) for the weaker teachers”.
However, Mary Bousted, General Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has argued that the Committee “did not do its homework properly”. Ms Bousted stated that “Performance-related pay would be totally inappropriate in schools and colleges because there are a huge range of factors which influence how well pupils do, many of which are totally outside the control of the school or college. All the evidence shows that a pupil’s family background has the biggest single influence on their success at school. And within any school or college it is impossible to work out which teachers, or other staff, have contributed most to a pupil’s progress since this reflects many years of learning”.
