A CROSS PARTY group of MPs has suggested that teachers should be paid by results. The National Union of Teachers (NUT) obviously opposes this, as they do to every innovation by whoever is the education secretary at any given time.
The NUT is overseen by a cabal of Left-wing ideologues , elected in all probability, by a mere fraction of their members. They have always put their member’s interests before those of the children their members teach: which is why it is hard to rid the profession of its incompetent teachers - which in turn is why the Commons cross party education select committee has dreamed up the wheeze of pay by results.
Apparently the bad teachers will remain in situ but on lower salaries than their more competent colleagues. This does not address the fundamental problem however. These ineffectual and damaging individuals will remain teaching our children. It is the children that are important here, and this committee is suggesting they continue to be taught by the inept.
For once, I agree with the NUT in their response where they list the many means by which such teachers can cheat such a system and continue with the same pay scale.
Firstly according to the NUT performance related pay would lead teachers to exaggerate their charges progress to ‘secure lucrative bonuses’; and lead to divisions in schools as individual teachers ‘over-claim’ the effect they are having on a child’s grades.
If the NUT believe their members are capable of such stunts, then the politicians had better take the NUT’s claims seriously. If at some stage pay by results is brought in then the ways around it will test the ingenuity of teachers. New scams will evolve and be passed from school to school, all ultimately to the detriment of the pupils whose futures are being moulded by people who should never be in a classroom.
THE TRUTH IS, that this proposal gives a temporary lift to those conservatives like myself who believe that the education of children to be the most socially useful practice that any human can aspire to. For where would our doctors and nurses be if they had not had a grounding within the education system?
It has been a scandal for decades that it is almost impossible to sack a teacher. Any teacher the head of a school believes to be falling short, knows will turn to his or her union, if they are faced with expulsion. Headmasters, now fearing the inevitable backlash by the NUT and other unions, are all too willing to pass the teachers on to another school where they continue to ruin the life-chances of even more children.
There is only one way you can improve the educational chances of our children; and that is by not allowing them to go anywhere near an incompetent teacher. In other words, such teachers must be gotten rid of and not passed down through the system.
Those MP’s on the education select committee are it seems, as fearful of the teaching unions as many head masters seem to be. The solution, like all good solutions, is simple. Bad teachers must be told to leave the profession and allow our children to be well educated by those thousands of good and driven professionals who continue to learn themselves while bringing the best out of the pupils under his or her tutelage.
Until bad teachers are driven once and for all from our schools, then the education of thousands of our children will fall well short of what is required of them. The school staff-room should be a no-go zone for the bolshie-pedagogue, or the time serving cynic.
Many thousands of our teachers understand what is required of them. They have entered a vocation knowing full well that the money they earn will not make them rich. But they know that the money is secondary to the vocation. This does not mean however, that politicians of any colour can abuse our teacher’s enthusiasm by buying them cheaply.
WHO WAS IT WHO SAID education, education, education? Well as far as sifting out the rotten apples from the bottom of the barrel, Tony Blair fell well short of the sound-bite: and since then sound bite after sound bite has been the preferred light artillery of all our politicians irrespective of party.
The pay by results idea appears at first glance attractive, as all such popularist enticements usually are. But as with all such cure-alls, a moment’s pause to reflect will quickly disabuse even those stalwarts within all the parties who want to believe that there is finally a workable solution to this most shameful state of affairs.
It is shameful that so many young people are being given a second or even third rate education by teachers who are either ill qualified academically, and rely upon their membership of a union to remain in post, or because they no longer have the same enthusiasm that brought them into teaching in the first place.
Either way, they should make way, in the interests of children - if they still warm to such interests. The trouble is that the teaching profession, like all other professions within the public sector, has enjoyed privileges that do not exist in the private sector, like pension entitlements that have long since disappeared from the private sector.
THE TEACHING UNIONS must have standards of their own. It must be in their interest that teachers are of the finest quality and those who fall short should have their membership denied; thus separating them from any opportunity to ‘teach’ our children.
This would immediately put paid to being paid by results. If the unions wish to continue with their protection of inept teachers, then they will have to come to terms with whatever is thrown at them. Pay by results may be a weak and insipid response to the scourge of inadequate teachers still being allowed to teach; but it is the teaching unions that must allow head-teachers to sack individual teachers; if not the politicians will act in the somewhat jaundice manner of pay by results.
The NUT as well as other teaching unions had better re-distribute the balance between their concern for their members and the children they teach. It is the children that the people of this country care about above all other considerations. It may seem unfair to the teaching unions, but people care about the next generation and their chances in life; and those chances are minimised if inept and bungling ill-equipped teachers are sent into the classroom protected by their unions.
If the education unions cannot acclimatise themselves to the eradication of those of their members who are ill-fit to teach, then they will have to accommodate themselves with ‘solutions’, the architects of whom, will be politicians.
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