Michael Gove is at it again. Today he’s taken it upon himself to ‘heap further misery’ onto teachers with ‘reckless’ plans that would damage children’s education.
At least, that’s what the NASUWT teaching union would have you believe. The Education Secretary has in fact published advice for schools on performance-related pay, which they can use from September of this year. It means that coasting teachers won’t get automatic pay rises based solely on length of service, and that good teachers who put extra effort in will get pay rises. So the unions appear to be outraged not on behalf of their entire membership, but on behalf of those teachers who aren’t going to get pay rises: in other words, they’re annoyed that the game is up for poor performers. I’ve already written about why it’s odd that the NASUWT and the NUT don’t trust the people now in charge of these pay rises, given they are also teachers rather than evil overlords, or indeed Gove himself, but there was one other interesting line in the NASUWT’s response today. Its General Secretary Chris Keates said:
‘The inconvenient truth is that the Coalition Government’s real aim is to reduce teachers’ pay in order to maximise the opportunities for schools to be run for profit, damaging children’s education into the bargain.’
There are two very large logical leaps in this statement. The first is that rewarding teachers who are good at their job is somehow the same as introducing profit-making schools: something Michael Gove told the Speccie he wasn’t keen to do for a while yet anyway. The Education Secretary hasn’t been at all secretive about his sympathy for a profit motive in education, and neither has he been secretive about the barriers to that: the British public isn’t quite ready to embrace the idea of profit, and closer to home neither are the Lib Dems. So the idea that Gove is somehow trying to introduce for-profit schooling using performance-related pay as a Trojan horse doesn’t quite stand up. Perhaps a head teacher leading a for-profit school might be tempted to reduce the pay of all teachers in order to maximise the margins, but that would be a short-term strategy, given the good teachers would simply jump ship to a school that believes in investing in its staff. And once that began to happen, the quality of schooling would deteriorate, parents would jump ship too, and thus those nice big margins would have been for nothing.
The second is that performance-related pay will damage children’s education. The Sutton Trust recommended performance-related pay as a means of making the profession more attractive to talented graduates and penalising under-performers. It produced a report in 2011 which argued that high-quality teachers helped pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds gain 1.5 years’ worth of learning, while weaker teachers only added 0.5 years’ worth. What damages children’s education is not encouraging the brightest and the best to enter – and stay in – the profession.
What the unions’ reaction today tells us is that firstly they don’t trust Michael Gove with anything, and secondly that they’re willing to stand up for one group of teachers, but not another. They like to remind us how demoralised teachers are these days: it must be still more demoralising being a talented one when your union doesn’t believe you deserve a reward.
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