WHY ASK?
I have been a lawyer and a teacher, a wage slave and an employer. I went through school and I had kids at school, and I was Chair of Governors of a school. I even served on the Education Special Needs sub committee of my local Council.
Almost every professional is paid on merit of some description. For lawyers and accountants our pay is usually related to how much we earn for our employer. If we are in public service we are placed in pay bands, but moving up a band is usually only possible if you are good at what you do. It usually also involves taking on extra responsibilities. Often there is a performance bar or bars.
With teachers, it is much more difficult to measure “merit”. With a tough class, getting to the end of Friday afternoon without significant disruption is good teaching. With a good class, you should be expected to achieve excellence even on Friday afternoon.
There are schools with “good” kids that are not delivering.
There are schools combatting poverty, hunger, homelessness, gang culture, linguistic problems, and inadequate parenting that perform miracles to achieve “average” results from disturbed and distressed children.
WHY PAY ON MERIT?
If a school has easy kids and is not demanding of the children or of the teachers, everyone just coasts. Life is pleasant.
The fact that the children are not receiving the education they should receive is often not recognised.
The parents may be happy their child is in a “good” school. The child is probably happy achieving “success”” without much effort. And the teachers do not have to work hard.
The disgrace and betrayal is outrageous, but nobody cares. If a teacher or parent becomes a “troublemaker” they are eased out.
In most merit pay scenarios the Head and the senior teachers all receive pay rises because the results from the school are above average. It seems to me that the remedy for this situation is not merit pay, but a new head teacher who has standards and who will enforce them.
Some local authorites operate a “value added” measure, where the measurement is not the objective results but the rate of improvement. The children are measured in national or authority wide tests, marked independently rather than by teachers who know the children.
If the intake of 11 year olds -average age 11 years 6 months – has a reading age on average of 11.6, then taking them to 14.6 in three years is nothing special. But if they came in at 10.8 and go out at 14.5, that is real achievement. The results on the conventional league table still favour the under achieving school,
Schools have various techniques for massaging figures, One is to take the average and above average to improve them significantly, leaving the stragglers to straggle.
Working with the struggling children in small groups is labour intensive and will not produce “Excellent” results, so instead the schools put the same effort into the kids who do not need it.
One school which received over 60% of children from households where the mother tongue was not English was unhappy because the children were expected to achieve a faster rate of progression in all subjects. So they worked on the parents to produce figures a year later that only 15% of the same cohort were from non English speaking families, reducing the expectations. This was blown open when the Government inspectors queried the change in figures.
How Do We Measure Success?
If a child of eight is happy and confident at school, has reasonable English and Maths for their age, has good social skills and a good attitude to school, teaching that child is a pleasure. You are developing and drawing out the child, building upon the good work done in kindergarten, nursery, reception, and Early Years. I have never heard of a merit scheme which gives enough credit to those first few years at school.
No-one says “Mrs Hoskins, little Billy who you worked so hard with in the Reception class has just earned a First Class degree at Oxford – here is £1,000.”
The teachers for whom Billy was a breeze may well receive merit payments, and I do not say they do not deserve them. But Mrs Hoskins, the one truly important teacher in his life, gets no recognition.
If we are to have a merit scheme that excludes Mrs Hoskins, we are not running a merit scheme worthy of the name.
Teachers are human, and we could all do with more pay and the prestige of being recognised as a “Merit” teacher.
In a Merit scheme, teachers are likely to concentrate on whatever the powers that be see as “Merit”. If recognising potentially abused children is part of the scheme, almost every abused child will be spotted. And if that is not part of the scheme, fewer will be found, and later in their lives when more damage has been done.
In England at the beginning of the 20th Century, we had merit payments for teachers. Astonishingly the teachers “taught to the examination” and did not attempt to develop social skills, the wider child, or any special skills the child might have. So we abandoned merit payments.
Who Pays For Merit Payments?
Most proponents of merit schemes are not suggesting extra pay for teachers generally, but only a self funded redistribution scheme. Given that in practice the Head Teacher will decide who receives the Merit awards, those may go to his or her favourites and not necessarily to the best teachers. If “best” is equivalent to “not making waves”, the teacher who says “We are not doing enough for the children” will certainly not receive a Merit award.
There are teachers who utterly respect the competence, educational values, and integrity of their Head Teacher. Alas there are many teachers who, if marking their Head’s performance, would give B-. They are suspicious of any merit scheme because it reduces their pay without necessarily rewarding the effective teachers.
If a school has two Merit awards to give out, there will be people who feel that they should have received a merit payment. They may well feel that Mrs Hoskins who spends far too much time mothering the children instead of teaching them, is not a worthy recipient. And of course the “Head Teacher’s pet” suspicion arises frequently. Merit schemes can foster dissension within the school.
The Under Achieving School
This book “The Under Achieving School” by John Holt is in some senses out of date. It holds many truths, the principal one being that it is often the underachieving school that is the problem.
I Declare An Interest
I taught on years two and three of the Law Degree at the College where I worked. The subjects I taught had the highest pass rates, and I received commendations from the External Examiners. I led a cross College group pulling together all the Work Experience experience of the College. I ran a schools debating competition. I pointed out to management that we were about to celebrate 175 years of teaching and suggested we gain some publicity. The College advertising leaned heavily on 175 years for quite a while. In any “Merit” scheme I deserved a Merit.
By contrast, the colleague I shared a room with spent all her time giving pastoral support to vulnerable students. Without her efforts I can think of at least ten students who would not have completed their degrees. She was clearly not worthy of Merit.
And as for Mrs Hoskins, she turned out well balanced kids from a tough school. Academic success was less important to her than being a good citizen. I do not say we were all good citizens, but many of us are better citizens for her efforts.
Thank You
Miss Hamm and Miss Grant, Lord Selkirk School, Vancouver B.C. Canada circa 1961. Collectively Mrs Hoskins.