Ah, is there any other two word phrase designed to invoke a mixture of fear, disgust and feelings of inadequacy in a teacher than ‘performance management’?
The process involves looking at your performance (clues in the name!) over the past academic year. It is meant to look at the training you recieved, your job description, a lesson observation (or more), results for key stakeholders1 and so on. Now, I never had my job description reviewed as part of PM, and to be honest, I never really had a PM meeting that was actually worth the time I spent preparing for it – and, embarrassingly, that includes the ones I led.
There are all sorts of problems with judging teachers on outcomes of students. I totally agree that we should hold teachers to account and hold them to the standards their students achieve. As an example, the first school I joined, way back in 1994 had a GCSE pass rate that hovered somewhere between 20 and 30% across all subjects. That’s appalling and so things had to change. However, outcomes never tell the whole story when dealing with the empotional, hormonal mess that is teenagers. It should never, ever be the sole measure of a teachers success.
A further example. A few years ago, as head of department I gave myself one of the worst behaved classes in the school. The idea was if I had all the naughty students, the rest of the department could focus on outcomes for the rest of the school. This was very successful, but we then had a new head who looked at my outcomes and rightly went ‘hmmm.’ By the way, one of those students achieved a grade 4 whilst undergoing some really horrible personal stuff. I was unbelievably proud of that result, but the class as a whole was not good.
One of the students didn’t turn up for his first maths paper, and when we contacted home, his mother went to get him out of bed. He told her it was okay, he’d do it next week instead in the catch up. There are no catch ups. He got a U and was on track to get a 5. I was furious and beyond frustrated, but some things are out of a teacher’s control.
PM is meant to avoid situations like this and consider everything you offer to the school. This is important for pay progression, but obviously results are our bread and butter and should be considered. I would prefer to look at progress over time – how much value do you add to the students in your care? There are two measures that are important here.
The first is P8, which stands for Progress 8. It looks at a students prior attainment and compares their progress with other similar students. If the figure is 0, the student performed exactly as expected, postive better and negative worse (obviously!). If you get a positive p8, you can justifiably claim to be doing a good job, and if its negative, I hope you kept good records as to all the contact you made with home, the detentions you gave etc. Due to COVID, P8 is currently not available, and so we’re back to only having attainment. This is flawed, as a school could be claiming 80%+ grade 4 or better, but those students should have been getting 5+. It’s a bit of a minefield!
The second is called a residual. This shows how the student performed in your subject compared to other subjects they took. The advantage of this is that it’s within your school, so did they do better for you than for others? As a mathematician, I hated this measure for years as we have to teach everyone and we get compared with subjects they chose to do. Of course, when my residual was positive, I wasn’t above shouting about it very loudly, particulalry if it combined with a negative P8. Pretty shameless, I know.
So the first bit of PM is looking at how your class performed. Setting targets on this is, of course, meaningless. Imagine if you turned around and said ‘oh, I’ll be happy with 100% grade 1s’ for a top set? Or if you said ‘100% grade 92‘, that would almost certainly be unattainable. But it is what you want isn’t it? I don’t want any student to fail, or get less than a 4, but sometimes that’s out of my control.
So results should be included in a review, but not part of target setting. Target setting should be about improving performance and standards in the classroom – wishful thinking about exam results (or pessimism) should not be included. Let’s just assume everyone wants their class to do the best they can.
Usually for PM you have three targets (sometimes 4, but that’s a bit naughty according to the unions) and the other two are about you and improving you. This also goes wrong as there isn’t time or money to actually follow through on this. A very long time ago now, I was told money and time would be no object to me improving maths results in a school. This message was delievered during a private telling off for me and my team by a head – correctly by the way, we had performed really badly the previous summer for reasons I won’t go into here. I had my PM meeting immediatley after this telling off, and its focus was on how to improve maths outcomes. The meeting ended with the promise of money and time. That promise lasted until the very next day when I asked for time off timetable for me and my deputy to review our curriculum and look at where we could improve. I was told no, and we had to carve out time to do it. Surprise, surprise, the review was not as effective as I hoped it would be.
So my experience of PM has not been great, and I’m really not convinced it improved me as a teacher. Things that did improve me are working with other colleagues, swapping ideas, observing lessons and getting a real sense for what works and what doesn’t. I would encourage every teacher, regardless of their point in their career to get in and observe their colleagues – and not just the ones in their department. But don’t go in and just sit at the back. Take a notebook (real or virtual) and think about what is working and what isn’t. What can you copy? If someone is using lots of humour and your funny bone was broken at birth, then don’t copy that. However, if they greet everyone at the door by their first name3, do copy that.
Hmm, no funny stories, this week, but don’t worry, normal service will be resumed next week when I talk about lesson observations.
Until next time!
David Watkins 