Rt. Hon. Michael Gove MP

Secretary of State for Education

Sanctuary Buildings

Great Smith Street

London SW1P 3BT 4 January 2013

Dear Michael

SCHOOL TEACHERS’ REVIEW BODY 21ST REPORT:

RESPONSE OF THE NATIONAL UNION OF TEACHERS

This letter sets out the response of the National Union of Teachers, the largest teachers’ union, to the statutory consultation on your response to the STRB’s 21st Report.

We are extremely concerned at your action in requiring statutory consultees to respond by 4 January as the intervening school holidays have made it impossible to consult members fully. This inadequate and unjustifiable timescale makes it apparent that the Government wishes to implement its proposals without regard to consultation. We have nevertheless been able to survey the views of a sample of NUT members. That survey shows that teachers overwhelmingly reject the proposals. Our response represents that position.

We are also concerned at your statement about the proposed STRB remit on pay for 2013. We believe that the STRB’s remit should allow it to make such recommendations on pay as it deems appropriate. It would then be for you to consider those recommendations, in the context of Government pay policy if you so wished. You should certainly not constrain the STRB’s consideration of how an increase within the limits of that pay policy should be distributed.

NUT Response to the Proposals

You propose to accept all of the key recommendations made by the STRB. The STRB’s recommendations, far from raising the status of the teaching profession and supporting teachers as you claim, would undermine the profession and the education service. The STRB and successive Governments have failed to come to terms with the fact that a successful education service requires professional pay levels and career progression opportunities for all teachers.

As we made clear in our STRB submissions, we reject the dismantling of the national pay structure and promotion of greater PRP in teaching. We do not intend to restate our views in detail here but we wish to make it clear that we reject the proposals to remove fixed incremental pay points, alter the present basis of pay progression and introduce progression related to the outcomes of appraisal.

The STRB’s own survey of heads and chairs of governing bodies showed that about two-thirds were satisfied that the current pay system met their needs (STRB paragraph 2.23). The STRB also provides no evidence of widespread support for its recommendations from its direct encounters with teachers (STRB paragraph 2.25).

Contd/…


2

The following paragraphs focus on points of concern in relation to specific proposals but do not represent any acceptance of those proposals not considered in detail below.

Main Scale – removal of mandatory points

Progression prospects on the Main Scale are an essential element in recruitment and retention. Teaching already compares poorly with other graduate professions in terms of pay progression in early career. The present arrangements do, however, provide a benchmark against pay in other professions. Incremental progression arrangements are commonly used across other public sector professions which are key competitors for teaching. While they are less used in the private sector, they are by no means unknown there.

Your proposals are likely to worsen the relative position of teachers still further and reduce recognition of professional development in early career. We do not believe that teachers will be able to progress faster to any significant degree than they do under the current provisions. Instead, teachers will face restrictions on progression, often based on factors outside their control and in particular on the financial position of the school.

The STRB proposes retaining fixed points on the Main Scale as purely reference points. Even if accepted by you, this would be of far less value in terms of benchmarking career and pay progression for teachers. Potential recruits would realise that already poor levels of pay progression in early career had become far less secure, particularly while pressures on school budgets continue. Fixed points on the Main Scale should be retained but as mandatory points not points for reference.

“Portability” of pay entitlements

You are also considering the proposal to remove teachers’ rights to retain their present pay entitlements on the Main or Upper Pay Scales on moving schools. This proposal, if implemented, would greatly affect the ability of schools to recruit teachers since it would of itself create a massive deterrent to even considering moving schools. Many teachers, however, do not “choose” to move as the STRB suggests (paragraph 4.76) – they face unavoidable moves due to personal circumstances and should not as a consequence face a pay cut.

The removal of “portability” would also have significant equality implications. Women teachers, who are more likely to take career breaks, would be particularly badly affected by this proposal. There does not appear to have been any consideration of equality implications of this proposal and we demand that an assessment is carried out before any further thought is given to its implementation. Given, however, that the proposal was not part of the STRB’s remit or any consultee’s evidence, we believe that the proposal should simply be rejected.

Threshold assessment

The STRB recommendations on threshold assessment (STRB paragraph 4.72) and the Secretary of State’s proposals are characterised, as are certain other recommendations, by a lack of clarity. While a separate Upper Pay Scale exists, decisions on transfer to that scale must be verifiable, transparent and consistent and the criteria for success must be clear. The proposed “simpler” assessment system has no detail attached to it.

During our recent meeting with Departmental officials, we highlighted the apparent absence of any recent robust data on the outcomes of threshold assessments or other pay decisions on the basis of age, gender or ethnicity but drew attention to data previously collated which indicated significant equality issues in relation to BME teachers. Again we believe that a formal assessment is required before matters proceed further.

Unqualified teachers

The potential problems we have highlighted in relation to further pay flexibility for qualified teachers apply equally to the proposals on unqualified teachers (STRB paragraph 4.84).

Contd/…


3

Other flexibilities

The proposal to allow fixed-term TLRs would reverse one of the accepted benefits of the TLR system – the end of the iniquity of “rotating” responsibility payments. This proposal would lead to the reintroduction of fixed-term payments to teachers who should receive permanent payments. We are also concerned that, in the current funding climate, the proposal would lead to lower payments for responsibility, further driving down pay levels overall.

Recruitment and retention payments

The STRB correctly notes that the DfE evidence “underplays the extent to which the teachers’ pay framework allows for local circumstances to be accounted for” (STRB paragraph 3.53). The existing reluctance to use the existing flexibilities should, however, be seen as providing two warnings against further flexibility. The first is that head teachers generally believe that individual payments militate against team working. The second is that promoting “flexibility” is meaningless when schools are under financial pressure and any decisions would inevitably but unfairly reflect those pressures.

Toolkit and Guidance

We note the STRB recommendation that the DfE should develop guidance or a tool-kit for leadership teams (STRB paragraph 4.70). This is a welcome recommendation and we hope that the DfE takes this forward, albeit we would prefer it to do so in the context of the current structure. Given the teacher unions’ day to day experience of casework on our members’ pay, we would wish to be fully involved in any such initiative and with any work in considering revisions to the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document.

Market-facing pay for local areas

The STRB purports to have rejected localised pay. It has concluded that there is “no evidence of crowding out of the private sector by the teaching profession” (STRB paragraph 3.52). This conclusion is in line with the evidence we presented to the STRB on this issue; and it destroys one of the foundations upon which arguments for localised pay are built. The STRB’s proposals, however, are nothing more than an extreme version of local pay which would damage teacher supply and the quality of the education service.

Criticisms of the STRB Analysis

The following paragraphs highlight parts of the STRB Report where we believe the analysis and thinking is particularly at odds with the evidence and opinion in teaching.

The key issue in the context of the latest STRB report is the total failure of the STRB to understand the importance of teamwork in schools. The STRB says it acknowledges this issue, but in the same sentence argues for individual pay arrangements (paragraph 4.44). These positions are incompatible. Also in this context, the preponderance of PRP in the private sector and its use elsewhere in the public sector referred to by the STRB (paragraph 4.42) is completely irrelevant.

The STRB argues that the “principle” of PRP is established in the pay structure above the Main Scale (paragraph 4.43), but this ignores both the widespread opposition to PRP amongst teachers and the problems it has caused. The STRB dismisses the overwhelming opposition to PRP from teacher unions. It fails to address the fundamental unfairness and inefficiency of rewarding team working by means of divisive individual pay awards, subject to an individual school’s budgetary position. It also takes no account of the damage done to appraisal by linking it with pay.

OECD research notes that: “Teachers need to be able to work in highly collaborative ways” (OECD Preparing Teachers and Developing Leaders for the 21st Century, page 52). This underlines the importance of teamwork in teaching. The OECD report notes that many education systems face a daunting challenge in recruiting high quality candidates. This is equally true of England and Wales. This challenge may have been obscured somewhat by the economic crisis, but we have already seen an increase in teacher wastage in England of almost a fifth in 2010-11 (Parliamentary Answer November 2012).

Contd/…


4

A separate OECD report quoted by the STRB (“Building on a High Quality Teaching Profession”) argues, as the STRB notes, that measures of performance must be “valid, reliable and agreed by teachers themselves” (STRB paragraph 2.6, page 6). None of these criteria are met under performance-related pay (PRP) arrangements.

The STRB is dismissive of the OECD finding that there is no relationship between pupil performance and the use of pay systems with performance-based elements (STRB paragraph 2.8, page 7/OECD “Does performance-based pay improve teaching” 2012). One of the key reasons for the problems referred to by the OECD in empirical analysis on this issue is that it is impossible to justifiably attribute pupil outcomes to individual teachers.

The STRB’s reference to Sweden omits to mention that, according to the OECD, Swedish teachers’ salaries are well below the international average – even though Swedish GDP per capita income is well above the international average (OECD Education at a Glance 2012). This has resulted in a claim from the Swedish unions that pay is too low by over a thousand euros a month; that teachers are losing social standing; and that teacher training courses are struggling to fill places. There are reports of urgent teacher shortages in physics and chemistry in Sweden. This is what happens when pay is individualised.

The STRB notes that academies tend to use the national pay scales or similar arrangements, even though they are able to vary them. The STRB predictably interprets this as academies being “held back” on the basis of a report produced by the right-wing pressure group Reform (STRB paragraph 2.16). No consideration is given to the possibility that academies value the national pay structure for its promotion of teacher mobility and the unnecessary time and expense saved.

Conclusion

We have set out clearly why we believe the STRB recommendations on pay are unjustified, divisive and damaging. The failure of the STRB to understand key concepts such as the importance of teamwork in teaching, the impossibility of accurately attributing individual pupil outcomes to individual teachers and the importance of the national pay scale in ensuring the efficient and fair reward of teachers across close to 25,000 employment units has resulted in a set of proposals that are unjustified, divisive and damaging. The status of the profession, already undermined by pay freezes and planned pay caps, would be further damaged by the removal of a clear career path for teachers. This failure to come to terms with fundamental principles, and a tendency to selectively cite supportive research whilst dismissing inconvenient research, means that the STRB recommendations on pay are built on sand. We urge you to reject them.

Yours sincerely

CHRISTINE BLOWER

General Secretary

.