Performance-related pay for teachers has never added up

How do you assess empathy? Performance-related pay for teachers was surely an idea dreamed up in a politician’s office, without any apparent understanding of the jobs they do – or of the importance of qualities the best teachers possess in abundance. It is against this troubled backdrop that the Department for Education’s Workload Reduction Taskforce has published its initial proposals, the centrepiece of which is calling time on the idea of performance-related pay. At the beginning of the report, schools minister Damian Hinds says: “We recognise members’ concerns around the administrative and workload burden of Performance-Related Pay and its impact on teaching and learning.” The government has thus accepted the recommendation that PRP be scrapped and “replaced with a less bureaucratic way to manage performance fairly and transparently”. They’ve spent years rightfully complaining about the bureaucracy of performance pay, and protesting the 60 to 80-hour weeks that can result from it – as if you can somehow put a figure on Ms Lee spending a couple of hours after school imparting the idea that algebra isn’t as scary as it looks, or Mr Lenoir putting going the extra mile to show that French irregular verbs are possible to get to grips with if you take it one step at a time.