Performance, pay and partnership

LSE study of the Green Paper pay system for teachers and its effects

Teachers before the 'Threshold'

1. Performance, pay and partnership

'The Government wants a world-class education service
for all our children'.

The opening sentence of the Green Paper Teachers: meeting the challenge of change expresses the manifold pressures on our education system to provide the skills our children need in a fast-moving global economy while at the same time stressing the need for social inclusiveness. A distinguished French politician summarised his country's response to the shifting balance in the world economy as: 'we have no oil, but we have ideas'¹. As the former US Labour Secretary, Robert Reich, argued, jobs in the advanced industrial countries depend increasingly upon our human capital, and hence on the quality of our educational systems². The question is how to deliver this with a workforce of teachers who feel and are widely seen as under-paid and under siege.

To address these problems, the Government has proposed to raise teachers' salaries substantially, but selectively, by introducing a 'Threshold' at the top of the current experience-related salary scale. On passing this, teachers would enter a new upper pay range with further pay increases based on an annual performance review. Passing the Threshold would itself be based on an assessment of their professional knowledge and teaching skills, and more controversially, on pupil progress. Although performance pay has operated for head teachers since January 1991, its introduction for classroom teachers is a radical departure. As the teachers' unions point out, there has been nothing comparable for teachers since the experiments of linking pay to pupils' results were abandoned a century ago.

Unlike its recent predecessors, this Government espouses social partnership as a method for promoting social and economic change. This offers a new role and a new challenge to unions. Modern pay systems that seek to encourage employees to develop their skills and improve their performance pose a direct challenge to the old 'rate for the job' systems, but they also generate new demands for employee representation.

Recognising the importance of this new approach to teachers' rewards, the Centre for Economic Performance decided to launch a 'before-and-after' study of the reforms. This article discusses provisional results from the 'before' part of the study based on a questionnaire survey of teachers carried out in January and February 2000³. The new salaries are scheduled to come into operation in the autumn of 2000 after an intense period of teacher assessments for the Threshold to be carried out during the summer. We plan follow-up surveys next year and in two years' time.

This article examines some of our early findings on teachers' responses to the proposed system. At the end of the article, I discuss some likely problems and look at the potential role for union-management partnership.

1. 'On n'a pas de pétrole mais on a des idées'.

2. Reich R. B., 1991, The work of nations., Vantage Books, New York.

3. It should be stressed that all of the statistical results in this article are provisional, using that part of the final sample ready for analysis at the time of writing. It represents about two thirds of the likely final sample, and is based on just under 3,000 replies.

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