Star performers to break salary cap



By Justine Ferrari    

A trial of paying teachers annual bonuses of up to $6000 is under way in Victorian government schools to assess whether rewarding quality teachers improves their effectiveness and their students’ performance.

Principal Graeme Lane says he agreed to his school participating in the scheme because it was the first attempt to define excellence in teaching.

Under the scheme, individual teachers assessed as the most effective over the previous year will be singled out for a financial bonus. Teachers will be assessed against a range of measures, including the progress of their students, their impact on the school and their colleagues, their involvement with the school community, innovations and research within the school.

The Teachers Reward trial is one of two being conducted by the Victorian government under the national partnership on teacher quality, jointly funded by the federal government, with the other trial providing rewards to the school as a whole.

The School Rewards model will pay bonuses to the top 20 per cent of the state’s government schools that demonstrate the greatest improvement on a broad range of measures, including students’ performance in the national literacy and numeracy tests.

One of the schools invited to participate is Balwyn North Primary School in Melbourne’s affluent eastern suburbs.

Mr Lane said the school valued quality teaching and saw value in the scheme because it moved beyond a simplistic linking of teacher pay with student test scores. “I see it like a footy club: you have to be part of a team but some players get paid a lot more than others,” he said.

“Yet they can make it work and still have a very strong team focus and performance.

“I think teaching can do that as well. That’s the culture I’d like to see. We’re building a high-performing team in which some people are stars and necessarily should be rewarded for that.”

Under the trial, a percentage of the school’s staffing budget is allocated for teacher bonuses.

At Balwyn North, the nominal distribution would reward a leading teacher with $6000, an expert teacher about $5000 and a graduate teacher $3000.

Mr Lane said the principal would retain flexibility so if he had two outstanding candidates one year, he would give them both a bonus and reward only four instead of seven accomplished teachers.

Support for the concept of performance pay is much stronger among younger teachers, who are more comfortable with being judged and rewarded on how they do a job than their senior colleagues, who adopt a more collegiate approach to their job.

Mr Lane said older teachers recognised a broader range of measures in their teaching, such as teamwork; younger teachers tended to see their role as doing a
good job with kids.

“We are treating this as a research project. We have a theory that rewarding teachers financially would improve student learning. It will be interesting in two years’ time to see if the theory holds true,” he said.

Article from The Australian, May 24, 2010.