Punitive, demoralising, threatening… Is this really a culture that nurtures long-term improvement? No, says Brian Lightman. And rushing to bring in performancerelated pay for teachers will only foster more resentment.

Explosive situation?

One of the most startling paradoxes in education at the moment is the juxtaposition of the rhetoric of a high-status profession – valued, trusted, extremely well led, using its autonomy to drive up standards – with the toxic discourse that criticises and even derides their efforts.

Let us start with the premise that every single one of us involved in school and college leadership wants to do the very best for young people in our care, has high ambitions for what they can achieve, will not make excuses to justify underachievement and will work tirelessly to that end. Not everyone will be as effective as the best but we all know that one key to success is to ensure that our organisations are not only good employers but exemplary ones.

As someone at the helm of a professional association, I believe that ASCL has a responsibility to lead by example. This is why the ASCL team and I committed to an ambitious process to build upon our Investors in People (IiP) status and we are immensely proud to have achieved both the gold and the health and well-being standards.

This is not about a badge, pleased though we are to have it. It is about a root and branch review of our people management in order to make ASCL more effective and productive. It is about frank and open discussion, about creating an environment where every member of our team has a say and where we all recognise and embrace the fact that we can do even better. It is about giving every member of our team a chance to develop; it is about being a place where people want to work and where going to work every day is a satisfying and enjoyable experience.

But the purpose of this article is less to talk about ASCL’s internal operations and more to refl ect on the experience of going through that process while living and breathing everything that is going on in our schools and colleges and in the minds of policy makers.

Autocratic model

A culture of continuous improvement is at the heart of the IiP process, especially reviewing the way that people are managed.

I wish I did not have to state what should be blindingly obvious to those at the helm of the education system – namely, that such continuous improvement is impossible to achieve with an autocratic model that imposes external targets and punishes anyone who fails to meet them. Neither can it be achieved by a culture of threats.

But you only need to mention Ofsted to school leaders to see where things are currently falling down so badly.

More and more members are telling me what a punitive and demoralising experience inspection is, even when the outcome is one of the two top grades. And they are telling me how they have to pick up the pieces with their staff afterwards.

We all know that effective, rigorous appraisal and performance management systems are essential features of a good employer. We know that open, frank and often challenging discussions about strengths and weaknesses need to take place. The question is how we implement and use those procedures, rather than whether we should have them.

Take the example of a committed member of staff who is doing a sound but not outstanding job, has a number of areas for development but also has identifi able strengths. An effective appraisal discussion would start with the strengths. It would recognise what is going well and would then tackle the areas for development in a constructive and supportive way. It would look at the training needs of the member of staff, probably including some mentoring or coaching in those weaker areas.

Would the member of staff be more willing to engage, more open to working harder to improve, if the appraisal started with a litany of the things that were wrong, that needed improvement?

As school and college leaders we all know the answer to that.

Adversarial approach

Compare that with the example I heard of a recent Ofsted inspection where the opening line of the lead inspector in the fi rst meeting with the headteacher was, “I am of the opinion that this school is requiring improvement.”

Before that inspector had been near a single classroom or had a single conversation with a teacher, student, parent or governor, the damage had been done. This is just poor management. It is an adversarial approach that puts the profession in defensive mode, focused on damage limitation instead of system improvement.

It is this punitive culture that is the problem around the current performancerelated pay proposals.

Those on the leadership spine have been used to performancerelated pay progression for years and, as an association, we have encountered few problems with it. Effective performance management, based on sound evidence, constructive discussion and the provision of training and support, is a motivator.

But the discourse at the moment, compounded by financial conditions where the profession is facing an effective reduction in take-home pay, is absolutely the wrong way to make this work.

We all know how demanding the early years of teaching are, how you need to learn the ropes and how many years it takes in the classroom before even the best teachers really master the job. ASCL would therefore expect to see the vast majority of teachers on the main scale progressing each year. They will only become better teachers by working in a climate in which talking about why lessons have not gone well is considered to be as much of a strength as sharing examples of what works best.

The IiP framework looks carefully at how employers recognise and reward everyone’s contribution and pay is just one element. It is far more important to ensure that people who are working so hard know and hear that their efforts are valued.

We will be facing further turbulent times over the coming months with industrial a action more than likely. School leaders, in many respects, are between a rock and a hard place as disputes between classroom unions and the government become more confrontational. We have new pay policies to implement, limited resources and immense external pressure against a backdrop of ever-increasing demands, further changes to pay and conditions under review, more inspection and less support.

We must not underestimate the challenge that this presents. But maybe the answer can be found somewhere in the IiP process we have undergone at ASCL.

As an independent employer, we do what we think is best and have a great deal of autonomy to do so. Schools and colleges, whether in the maintained, independent or academy sectors, also have high degrees of autonomy over the employer functions carried out by leadership teams.

That is why ASCL believes that the best way forward is to take things slowly with the changes to pay and conditions, to consult fully and openly and to do what we have always believed in: to lead and manage staff in ways that recognise that none of the ambitions for our schools will be achieved without looking after them and their best interests.

Meanwhile, as your professional association, we will continue to challenge the external interference that undermines your capacity to do what you know is right.

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