STOPP Labour’s war on teachers!
Gill Lee, Officer, Lewisham NUT (Personal Capacity)
At a packed conference on Saturday October 9th STOPP (School Teachers Opposed to Performance Pay) was launched. Teachers met to discuss how to oppose the government’s Green Paper, which would damage teamwork, equal opportunities, and damage education.
The teaching unions seem set to reach accommodation with the government unless a mass campaign can stop them. The NUT Executive has failed to mount the campaign of publicity and strike action agreed by the union’s Annual Conference.
In its evidence to the Review Body the government says:
"Pay must be flexible and put service needs first. It means challenging outdated assumptions, for example, the idea that fair pay’ means everybody should get the same increase, or that pay and conditions should be set nationally". The government’s proposals are designed to hold down the general level of pay for teachers.
Education as a whole will suffer. Teachers who can do so, will increasingly choose to work in schools where targets can be met i.e. schools with a ‘better’ intake.
Schools which have a more working class intake will find it harder to attract teachers whose pay is dependent on their ability to ‘meet targets’ often beyond their control.
Not achievable
All teachers know that "results" – whether measured by exam results, attendance or any of the other ‘exemplar’ measures contained in the government’s guidance on the implementation of the green paper – are not achievable by them as individuals. For any one teacher to obtain pay based on performance depends mainly on the intake of the school.
As Nick Davies showed in his recent series of articles for The Guardian, comprehensive education has been considerably undermined by Tory educational reforms, continued by Labour, which led to the increasing division of schools by social class.
Ofsted criteria mean that schools likely to attain less than average national results (in other words schools with a working class intake), are likely to be labelled as "failing".
While some teachers, despite the huge workload and stress involved, continue to work at schools ‘under special measures’, schools with ‘serious weaknesses’ and schools which have been ‘fresh started’, many others understandably get out and find jobs in schools seen as ‘easier’.
By rewarding "successful teachers" Labour’s proposals will increasingly divide schools into ones which can attract teachers seen as ‘successful’, while schools in which teachers would find it harder to meet targets will increasingly be staffed by newly qualified staff or staff waiting for appointment to ‘better schools’. All this will increase the polarisation of schools – to the disadvantage of working class children.
Labour’s plans are a major challenge to the pay and conditions of teachers, to the team work that is necessary for teachers to do their jobs; and to the existence of the teachers’ unions.
Teachers’ pay as a whole will be held back, while only those prepared to submit themselves to the ‘threshold’ appraisal process will gain pay increases.
Given the low level of pay for teachers on the main scale, many teachers will feel they have to apply, despite the quite small increases in pay and the increased workload involved in the new pay spine. Each of the new performance points will be worth only £800 - £1000, but the government appears willing to throw a lot of money at the scheme in the first year to ‘bed it in’.
Teachers who go on the fast track programme will be expected to ‘make an additional commitment’ to the job (attending training in their own time) and ‘should be exempted form the working time limits that apply to other classroom teachers’.
This will put pressure on all teachers to work even longer hours each week than the 48 reported in the NUT’s own surveys.
The division of the workforce by payment according to results will undermine the teamwork essential for teachers to do their jobs.
Teachers will be more reluctant to share ideas, take on difficult pupils and classes, or support other colleagues through pastoral intervention if they know a colleague is being paid more as a ‘good’ teacher than they are. Pupils as well as teachers will lose from this.
The very existence of the teaching unions is also threatened by the green paper. It effectively brings in individual pay bargaining; strengthens management’s ability to decide who merits higher pay (and who is simply a ‘disruptive element’) – and erodes nationally determined conditions.