Performance Management

Monitoring Teaching in the Primary School

Sara Bubb, Pauline Hoare

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134130016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This research-based book offers practical guidance on how to go about performance management. Based on experience of working with schools and running courses, and using the latest research on business strategies appropriate for education, it: o looks at what performance management means in practice o offers advice on how to go about monitoring o explains how to use data from pupil assessments o suggests ways to judge the effectiveness of teaching through analysing children's work o gives guidance on monitoring planning, assessment and observing lessons o proposes how to 1853467693reas for development, set objectives and draw up action plans o contains useful photocopiable formats o uses case study material to illustrate potential problems and good practice Throughout, the purpose is to help schools and teachers to be more effective.

Performance management — an overview

The nature of teaching

Teaching is an isolating profession, especially in the primary sector and until recently it was possible to spend one’s whole career in the classroom yet never be observed teaching. The good old days some might say, but the downside of this is the lack of recognition and the lack of development. Consider the nursery teacher, 25 years in the classroom, who broke down in tears when she was — finally — told that she was an excellent teacher, with a stunning range of classroom skills. Being told that what you are doing is worthwhile can be validating and empowering. Equally, insensitive handling of situations where teachers need to change or develop their skills can be devastating. A new job in a new school, children from a different type of catchment area, different behavioural and academic expectations can challenge even very confident and experienced teachers: they may need to develop aspects of their professional expertise which they have not used before. Equally, the problem may lie in leadership and management skills at a level above the class teacher. Does the subject coordinator have the appropriate leadership skills to secure improvement in the subject? Does the senior management team have a sure grasp of the issues at a strategic level, so that resources are targeted correctly. Teachers need to be very aware of these potential tensions and associated sensitivities. Used intelligently and creatively, performance management can be the key which unlocks these difficult situations.

The reasons for performance management

Performance management was introduced from September 2000 and is effectively the successor to appraisal. The appraisal system was adopted in many schools, but not all. Even where appraisal has, for a variety of reasons, fallen into disuse, very many schools regularly carry out professional interviews, with the purpose of linking school and individual needs. Where the appraisal system was adopted, schools have found it helpful in linking the needs of the school as expressed through the school development plan with the aspirations of teachers in terms of their own professional development. The purpose of performance management is to strengthen these strands, so that the professional development of teachers and therefore also their pleasure and satisfaction with the profession of teaching is increasingly linked with the progress of pupils and the success of the school.

In some quarters, performance management is regarded solely as a system adapted from the business world with the intention of helping schools improve the service they give to their pupils. It is true that many aspects of performance management have been adapted from aspects of business practice, but this view ignores the prior work done in many schools through the appraisal system. The Green Paper (DfEE 1998d) was the development of a new avenue, intended to lead to improved accountability, higher standards and greater success for pupils. It was predicated on a fusion between the best that had so far been achieved by leading schools and best practice in business.

The place of performance management in school

Performance management is firmly linked to threshold assessment, and that in turn links to the new standards that were introduced for aspiring head teachers through the National Professional Qualifications for Headships (NPQH), for serving head teachers, and for newly qualified teachers (NQTs) under the induction standards. It is designed to support school improvement and the raising of standards. It is part of a range of measures introduced over the last few years. The National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies were originally put in place with the intention of eventually ensuring that all 16-year-olds leave school with a basic competence in reading and writing. Teachers have implemented these strategies and have achieved much success (OFSTED 2000a) but this concentration on core skills has revealed areas where schools need to target their efforts more closely to the needs of the pupils they serve. For example, the underachievement of boys in writing (OFSTED 1999a) and of ethnic minorities, in particular black Afro-Caribbean groups (OFSTED 2000a, b, and particularly d). This is the background to the widening of the school improvement agenda through performance management, threshold assessment and external advice to governing bodies.

From September 2000 schools had to put in place a new performance management system which includes:

• agreeing annual objectives for each teacher, including objectives relating to pupil progress and ways of developing and improving teachers’ professional practice;

• for head teachers, objectives relating to school leadership and management and pupil progress;

• in-year monitoring of progress and classroom observation of teachers;

• an end of year review meeting, which involves an assessment of teachers’ overall performance, taking account of achievement against objectives, agreeing objectives for the coming year and discussion of professional development opportunities/ activities;

• using performance review outcomes to inform pay decisions, where appropriate.

Teachers are often resentful of businessmen and women demanding closer attention to basic skills, but fundamentally it is the success of the national economy that pays teachers’ wages. World markets are very difficult to access if a quarter of your workforce can hardly read or work out change from 50p, let alone operate a computer effectively. The questions that people in government and industry are asking can be boiled down to one: ‘Why can’t young people who’ve spent 11 years in compulsory education read and write?’ This question has been asked since the 1970s, and more recently, shortly before OFSTED was set up in 1993. At this point, 40 per cent of school leavers in the UK, as against 70 per cent in Germany, and more than 80 per cent in Japan left school with a craft/technician diploma or above (Brighouse and Moon 1995). Many different theories have been put forward for these low levels of qualification after 11 years of compulsory education: trendy teaching methods; government legislation undermining the structure of the family; the continual change forced on schools; the collapse of religion — the list varies according to political allegiances. Whatever the causes, such a high level of illiteracy needs addressing. Performance management is in many ways the next layer of the campaign for increasing the levels of literacy and numeracy.

The purpose of performance management

Performance management is a system for reviewing and agreeing priorities within the context of the school development plan. Its purposes can be characterised in a range of ways. It may be described as a pyramidal hierarchy of objectives: for the institution, for the management and for the teachers. In this sense it is the institutional mirror image of target setting for pupils. Its objective is to improve the match between the offered and the received curriculum. The way it sets about this is by encouraging schools to support teachers’ work as individuals and in teams through the process of setting, agreeing and reviewing school objectives. There are links to the discretionary pay awards that governing bodies make: how the governors decide to do this is a matter for debate in each governing body. To dismiss the process as ‘performance related pay’ (PRP) and then to state that ‘It didn’t work in industry’ is inaccurate. As a system it is far more sophisticated than approaches used in industry (ACAS 1990, Ironside and Siefert 1995, Sisson 1995.)

System linkages with performance management

Between 1999 and 2000 the DfEE spent £7.296 billion on primary schools and £9.037 billion on secondary schools. It is fair to ask whether the government is getting value for money on behalf of the taxpayers. It is also fair for the government to establish systems for finding out how effectively schools spend the huge national investment that has been delegated to them. Performance management was introduced after national consultation as an equitable way of raising standards and rewarding teachers who contribute effectively to the efforts of the school as a whole to drive forward pupil progress. The system works by encouraging schools to support teachers as individuals and in teams through the process of setting, agreeing and reviewing school objectives.

The newness of the system has antagonised many teachers. The victims of constant change for more than ten years, it is not surprising that in some quarters there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm for yet another initiative. However, recent publications like Recognising Progress — Getting the most from your data (DfEE 2000c), provide a useful explanation of how performance management links directly to the production of the school development plan, supports the collection of data for threshold assessment and can be used as an effective method for raising standards.

Data analysis

During the collection of data for the threshold process, teachers raised concerns about the validity of statistical data. It should always be borne in mind that statistics can be used to support or oppose any argument: they are a device for working out what questions to ask. This is the area where most teachers’ skills are at their weakest. Statistics do not normally form part of an arts degree, although the psychology and social sciences graduates will have had some training in the use and interpretation of statistics as part of their first degree (Beresford 1999). National agencies accept test data as a starting point. It should not be regarded as a final judgement on the worth of schools or of teachers, although this is how many teachers perceive it. Representatives of government and non-governmental organisations (NGO) are attempting to find out via such statistics how to address levels of illiteracy and innumeracy. Statistics are a way of discovering what questions it may be useful to ask, they should not be regarded as an answer in themselves. The picture presented through statistics gives a very partial picture of the strengths and achievements of different schools.

In the world of statistics, it is possible to predict the theoretical gain that a child might make in each term at school, and measure how far in advance or how far behind the expected rate of progress that particular pupil is.

To gain a full picture of the school’s overall performance, it is useful to consider the performance of the complete year cohort. For example, you could consider the attainment of boys, ethnic minorities and English as Additional Language (EAL) pupils against progress made nationally, and the impact this has on the school’s overall performance. By looking at the performance of different groups of pupils in this way, you can get a more complete picture of the school’s overall performance, and this will help you with the setting of challenging yet realistic targets.

When analysing your school’s performance, it is helpful to probe for reasons why pupils have made better or worse progress than expected. The questions listed are useful for identifying priorities and strategies for school improvement.

Some questions for you to consider include:

• How does the progress made by pupils in different groups, sets or classes compare? Are there any noticeable differences in the progress made by boys, girls and ethnic minorities in each class?

• Have any pupils made unexpectedly good progress, or significantly less progress than expected? Are there any marked differences and if so can the teacher or the pupils, think of any reasons?

• In classes or groups where the majority of pupils make better than average progress, can teachers identify any teaching practices that they think contribute to their success? From the comparisons and discussions, what are the emerging priorities for the school?

• How do teachers set their expectations of pupils at the beginning of Years 1 and 2? Do pupils with high or low prior attainment make the progress expected of them?

• How do parents’ and pupils’ expectations of future performance compare with the information shown in the Progress Charts?

• If parents’ and pupils’ own expectations are low, can they identify any particular aspects of work they find difficult and where they would benefit from extra help?

• How do teachers’ forecasts and expectations for their pupils compare to what the Progress Charts suggest they could achieve? What are the reasons behind any low teacher expectations — what needs to be done, in the classroom or in other ways, to counter low expectations?

© Bubb and Hoare 2001

In the real world, where divorce, homelessness and all the other myriad horrors that beset children come into play, such notional progress may be impossible. The real story is of course, infinitely complex. It is part of the job of the school management to develop awareness among teachers that there are demanding, measurable expectations expressed through performance management, but at the same time emphasise the human side also. Teachers need to be fully aware of the demands and expectations coming from government and the local education authority and also to understand the shortcomings of the data. They need to be aware that the notional progress expected must be viewed in relation to the personal, social and emotional context of the individual child. In other words a holistic view is needed — plus a healthy degree of realism.

Monitoring

As well as rigorous data analysis, performance management also requires regular monitoring. Pupil achievement may vary over a year for a wide variety of reasons, and it is not acceptable to wait for the end of year results before realising that there has been a problem of some kind. This is why pupil progress will always form at least one of the objectives set for the head teacher’s own performance management interview. In most cases this will be linked to some form of report to the governing body that requires both data analysis and the monitoring of teaching. It is also likely that monitoring will also form an important part of the objectives set for senior teachers and members of the senior management team. This aspect of continuous m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Reference documents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Performance management — an overview
• Chapter 2 Criteria for judging teaching
• Chapter 3 How to monitor
• Chapter 4 Analysing data on pupil performance
• Chapter 5 Classroom observation
• Chapter 6 Monitoring planning
• Chapter 7 Monitoring children's work and teacher's assessment
• Chapter 8 Setting and reviewing objectives
• Chapter 9 Preparing to cross the threshold
• Appendix Standards for the award of Qualified Teacher Status (DfEE Circular 4/98)
• Bibliography
• Index