Education: Blunkett misses the target

Bob Spooner, Leeds North East CLP

Thatcherism has multiplied stress and insecurity and destroyed job satisfaction across the board. Blair has recently welcomed an extended middle class; what he failed to say is that the new recruits are as exploited as the working class has ever been. The system has infected commerce and teaching and nursing with new forms of exploitation.

Few would deny that teachers and nurses work best when they are relaxed, secure and appreciated. They are then motivated to improve performance and work beyond the call of duty. Yet New Labour's policies make no sense unless you believe the opposite: that teachers and nurses are instinctive slackers and need the carrot of a personal pay scale and the whip of loss of pay for poor performance to motivate them.

Making money is the main incentive of the commercial world. "Management" is about exploiting the workforce by setting ever more demanding targets and making jobs dependent on hitting them. Ruthlessly deployed, it engenders lies and deceit and leads to scandals such as the private pension racket that took so long to expose.

This is the world Blair believes in. The Green Paper on the proposed performance related pay scheme for teachers seeks to "alter the culture" of the staff room and import into it more of Blair's Tory philosophy. It is a document that the most right wing Tories would have been proud to produce.

Targets are now the biggest bane of the education service and are as dangerous as the millennium bug. The problem with hitting targets is that one is obliged to focus on them and ignore the rest of the landscape. Hitting them takes up an undue amount of time and energy, swamping everything else. Of course, whoever sets the targets determines the workload of those obliged to aim for them. Just by setting the target the minister or the governors intrude into schools. In turn the head teacher becomes a despot and the ambitious teachers become creeps.

Worse still, they are the wrong targets, and the teachers who get the rewards are likely to be the loud-mouthed martinets, who teach by rote and leave havoc in their wake. I do not see many of the sensitive, gentle, caring, modest, self-critical teachers, who are the saving grace of the teaching profession, getting much out of performance related pay, other than humiliation. Already, it is the hard-nosed, self-marketing characters who are getting the headships. You can't run any competitive system without branding "failure", usually on a bigger scale than you reward 'success'.

Payment by results will inevitably result in neglecting pupils who are struggling with their work and lavishing energy on those whose success pays off. Already poor teachers get impatient with those who struggle to understand what they teach. Competitive teaching is bound to worsen relationships in the classroom. In addition, of course, the intention is to extract even longer hours and more work from those few who gain the additional rewards. It will inevitably add to stress. Targets make the ludicrous assumption that all children have the same talents and, if properly taught, can do equally well. They can't; and it is grossly harmful to target a narrow range of skills and call those who fit the Blunkett mould successful, and those who don't failures.

The grisly Green Paper is crammed with sickening marketing sentiments. The reputation of OFSTED is at its lowest ebb because few people believe in its capacity to recognise quality teaching or even suss out failure; yet its verdicts, together with target hitting and "stringent" appraisal (which is code for headteacher bullying) will determine what teachers earn. Self-respecting teachers will not tolerate it; they will join the mad rush to leave the profession. If it is accepted, careers teachers in schools should be required to paste a health warning on teaching as a job option.

previous article ·  Feb '99 index of LLB ·  write to LLB ·  LLB home page ·  next article