Passage One
George Osborne’ s abolition of national pay bargaining for teachers is a drastic policy. It sweeps away mandatory pay scales and makes “cost of living” increases discretionary for most teachers. At a time when growing numbers of teachers are leaving the profession, this is an astonishing move.
Osborne’ s idea is to allow headteachers to set pay based on individual assessments—performance-related pay. The rationale for pay based on assessments, as opposed to collective bargaining, is that the best workers will be attracted to workplaces where their hard work and skills will be rewarded. They also respond better to what their employers consider important, thus improving performance.
There are a number of problems with such schemes, which often result in their being short-lived. Having been attempted previously in the 19th century, performance- related pay was reintroduced into schools in England first in 1991, when it was applied to headteachers, then to teachers in a number of schools in 2001. When the policy was extended by New Labour, the experience of headteachers in administering the system was surveyed extensively by the Teachers’ Incentive Pay Project at Exeter University. Most headteachers were opposed to the practice, feeling that it made little difference to how teaching was conducted, and were dyspeptic ‘about the narrow, numerical methods of measuring student progress.
The main problem with performance-related pay, however, is that it rarely works—even on its own terms. A comprehensive review of the scholarly literature on this subject from 2002 noted that among its disadvantages was the “neglect of unrewarded tasks” , as people cease doing parts of the job that can’ t be evaluated. It also undermined co-operation in necessarily co-operative roles, introducing competitiveness over goals and attainment. It led to less openness about failure, since few would admit to screwing up if it cost them money. Finally, there was the cost of administration and the problem of demoralising those who weren’ t rewarded.
This is the essence of the problem. Free market ideology assumes that people are fundamentally driven by competition and rewards. This might work in a high-stress sales environment, where what matters is the number and value of deals. But most jobs don’ t work like that. They require complex systems of co-operation on qualitative aspects of labour that can’ t be easily measured or attributed to any one worker. Other advantages for employers which are not so widely advertised are the weakening of unions, the strengthening of managers and the potential reduction of wages.
Osborne’ s announcement comes after he was forced to concede that there would not be regional pay awards for public sector workers, which would have accelerated the “north-south divide” . So the measure could be seen as an alternative way of attacking the union and reducing teachers’ wages. But it also follows a neoliberal tradition with global reach. Everywhere that the neoliberal prospectus has been implemented, there has been an attempt—strongly informed by public choice theory—to model public services on markets, using statistical benchmarks to suppress costs and create internal competition.
For example, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker became the centre of a furious wave of strikes, protests and occupations when he outlawed collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. Walker’ s supporters insisted that this policy would improve student performance. This is the last stand justification for such measures—if you’ re against us, you’ re against the children. In response to Walker’ s measures, American liberals argued that far from helping students, union-busting states seemed to do far worse by them—the five states that outlawed collective bargaining being among the poorest performers in SAT scores. More rigorous analyses show either that the abolition of collective bargaining leads to no improvement at all for students or that it results in a significant loss of performance.
One must tread very carefully in interpreting such figures, however. If jobs are rarely susceptible to statistical assessments, because of their qualitative and collective aspects, this is all the more true of learning. Learning is not a linear process in which students incrementally acquire facts and ideas, and nor are its results always measurable. Take reading and comprehension, for example. For any student to really grasp a text like The Owl and the Pussycat, for example, they must be capable of reflecting on the historical context in which Edward Lear was writing, as well as the meaning of money, marriage, travel and so on. Such reflections do not easily yield testable slabs of knowledge and it would be in the spirit of Grad grind to try to turn such a reading experience into a method to measure the comprehension of adjectives, nouns and verbs. So much the worse if a teacher’ s income depends on such trivia.
Teaching and learning are complex, collective processes which are corroded rather than enabled by the neoliberal demands for endless ranking and competition. The government’ s measures are good for neither teachers nor students.