A leap of faith? Performance pay for teachers

Abstract

This article evaluates the UK government's performance management initiative for teachers in England and Wales as set out in the Green Paper, Teachers: Meeting the Challenge of Change and subsequent technical amplification documents. This new initiative aims to ‘modernize’ the teaching profession, raise standards and provide financial rewards for individuals, teams and whole-school performance. The article draws upon the first detailed analysis of the 4,064 document archive held at the Department for Education & Employment (DfEE) and on the wide body of social science research into performance-related pay and performance management. It finds that when considered as a whole package, the initiative represents a relatively sophisticated set of proposals which reflects a great deal of the most recent thinking in reward management. Critiques, which dismiss the initiative in terms of traditional arguments against performance-related pay could be accused of ignoring some important features of the proposed change. Nonetheless, even when considered in its own, wider terms, the initiative is found to be flawed since even this ‘sophisticated’ package neglects some of the important realities of schools as complex organizations.

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