Simon I am not arguing with you about conditions in South Australia, I am simply telling you what conditions are like in Victoria.

In Victoria there is no central staffing function, it's up to each school to hire their own teachers. It's up to prospective teachers to contact all the schools they are interested in. Large schools with more than 3000 students have an HR manager but smaller schools don't and in one school I visited it was obvious they muddled on by. Anecdotally every one hates the on-line recruitment system, why the education department didn't just copy the TAFE online recruitment system beggars belief!

As the states don't raise taxes they rely on the Australian government for the money they spend on education, so if the Federal Minister for Eucation wants to bring in a new policy she should provide the funding to do so. On a philospohical point, why should the government provide more funds per capita to students in private schools than it spends on students in state schools? Although I don't have children I see it as my social responsibility to educate society's children. I believe my taxes should pay solid basic education in government schools not to provide swimming pools and multimedia centres for the privileged elite or religious indoctrination in the K12 schools in outer fringe.

It's really stupid to criticise all government schools when clearly the conditions vary markedly from state to state.
In Victoria this merit based pay debate has no impact on a third of all secondary school teachers who are employed outside the government system and has no impact on another third of teachers who are on contract.

The ugly sound of grinding axes fills the air.

I guarantee that performance pay will, at some point, be introduced into the education system.

It will be designed by bureaucrats, for bureaucrats.

There will be a thick, impenetrable instruction manual to school principals, who will be newly entitled "Senior School Executive", to reflect the fact that they are now management professionals as well as Head Teachers.

They won't be given management training, just a three-day seminar on how to observe the instructions in the manual.

The exercise will necessarily require a massive army of administrators, who will call themselves "inspectors" or some such quasi-official title, and they will be given strict instructions by the Department on how they should monitor the system.

They will tell the Senior School Executives that the inspector's job is to help the SSE with any aspect of the system (except management skills, of which they too will be bereft), but will instead implement a system to measure SSE conformance, and penalize any that show initiative.

The SSE will have three or four times the amount of paperwork to complete, but no additional financial recognition.

The system itself will be open to all sorts of abuse – teachers will quickly work out how to game the process. There will be fierce competition for i) the class that has the most improvement potential from the lowest possible base or ii) the class with the highest actual performance rating, depending whether an absolute or relative measure is used.

The measures used – absolute achievement, relative achievement, punctuality, cleanliness of fingernails – will determine absolutely the focus of the teacher. Students will become “inputs” to their payment process.

This happens with every, repeat every, pay-for-performance system. Think “outbound call centre”, and the role of the customer in the process.

After a couple of years, the Department will ask itself why school standards have not improved, despite the introduction of performance-based pay.

They will then tweak the measurement system and discover - lo! it hath in fact wrought wondrous changes.

And give themselves a pay rise.

Neither the Liberal or Labor party care

as Mr Rudd said Politics is all about the power

I didnt see schools in this comment

kevin Rund has also said it is the responsibilty of the states.

www.tapp.org.au

Let me first deal with the idea that teachers do not work in a place called the “real world”. Even in a well-run school, teachers can be responsible for 150 human beings, and in a poorly run one, many more. They have to bring together a diverse group of students to engage a class in learning. They give up lunchtimes and after-school time in voluntary activities. They are on duty 24/7 on school camps. They have to respond to the latest fads (self-managing schools, performance appraisal, etc, etc). They are often exhausted by the demands placed on them. They do all this and more while subject to the criticism of those who are manifestly ignorant of what teaching is like. Some of them deal with refugee children who have seen members of their own families murdered. The idea that schools are not part of the “real world” is absurd.

As I understand it, those who promote the ill-defined concept of performance pay believe that educational standards have got worse over the past few decades and that this latest panacea will improve them. Yet, 30 years ago, teachers were far better paid, movement up the pay scale was automatic, there was no performance review circus, staffing was centralised and all promotion positions were determined by the department. Since then, relative pay has been cut dramatically (making Simon Templar’s claim of 80 per cent of budget increases going on teacher salaries and conditions impossible), movement up the scale is no longer automatic, time-consuming and bullying annual performance reviews have been introduced, school principals appoint their own staff and all promotion positions are locally determined (meaning that there is no central placement process to be dictated by the union). Apparently, the introduction of the competing small business model has accompanied a claimed decline in standards, yet its advocates think we should go further down the road to failure.

The great bulk of teachers is intrinsically motivated to work hard. Performance pay will narrow the focus of education just as it did in the nineteenth century when it was called payment by results.

Kevin Rudd's Trojan Horse - Industrial Relations

The Labor party have campaigned hard against the new Workchoice regime of the Federal Liberal party, insisting that they will rip it up and decentralise its power.

Kevin's proposed changes to the unfair dismissal laws whereby employers with less than 15 employees have 12 months to dismiss their employees, and 6 months for those employers with more the 15 employees, does not give any job security to any National Australian worker.

The Labor advertisments whereby a mother is told that she will be dismissed if she does not show up for work and has no baby sitter, clearly indicates the Trojan that the Labor party have handed Australian women, part time and casual workers.

Labor is currently aware that business is in the grip of a Labour crisis, whereby they can console themselves, that an Employer would only want to keep a good employees.

But as Kevin says, what's going to happen after the Resources boom?

Conceded, strike action by ballot is taking away the power of Union executives and those who presume to represent it, and return power to the members.

As we suspected, Labor will not change the Workchoice regime, but give it a new title at the cost to the Australian taxpayer.

Kevin Rudd and the Labor parties strategy on vote analysis, is to gain the conservative business vote of the Liberal party to tip the scales in Labor's favour.

Labor is willing to do so by continuing to serve Australian workers heads to business on a 6-12 month platter.

Labor is already selling out on the Nuclear debate. Trojans

Simon Templar you seem to have similar experience to Graeden Horsell, he all comes from South Australia also, perhaps you two should get together sometime.

In Victoria schools are responsible for selecting their own staff, all position descriptions have to include 5 key selection criteria but often they don’t. Schools and individual teachers put a great deal of effort into selecting staff and being seen to select staff fairly. In my experience the selection process is process is followed meticulously because the decision is announced publicly and unsuccessful candidates have the right of appeal, so their decision must be able to be audited.

I think the major reason for not implementing performance based pay systems is the sheer numbers of teachers involved. There are about 100,000 teachers in Victorian government schools but probably at least 250,000 teachers in NSW government schools. Imagine the bureaucracy involved in subjecting them all to merit based pay. When large private employers implement merit based pay schemes it’s usually restricted to permanent staff at head office and involves less than 5% of their workforce.