Balancing act: Half of OECD countries use some form of pay flexibility for teachers, says a report

The OECD has examined data from its Pisa tests to find whether targeting pay improves pupil achievement.

Previous studies have identified the importance of high-quality teaching.

But the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher says the international evidence reveals “no relationship” between pupils’ test results and the use of performance pay.

Researchers have already established that top-performing school systems are likely to have teachers who are well-paid or with high social status.

Stretched budgets

The quality of teaching has been identified as central to the outcomes for pupils.

A previous OECD report advised that raising achievement in schools depended on attracting the best students into teaching with “status, pay and professional autonomy”.

But raising the pay for all teachers becomes difficult when public spending is under such pressure in many countries.

The OECD report says many countries facing financial constraints want to see whether they can increase the rewards for the most effective teachers.

The OECD’s membership includes more than 30 of the world’s industrialised countries – and about half of these already use some kind of extra pay incentives for specific teachers.

As such, the OECD has examined whether such a targeted, performance-related approach delivers better results.

Professional status

The findings are that there is no clear pattern.

“In other words, some high-performing education systems use performance-based pay while others don’t,” writes Mr Schleicher.

South Korea, often applauded as an education success story, does not use performance pay. But Finland, often commended for an equitable system, does use an element of performance-based pay.

England has a performance threshold linked to higher pay – while France and Germany do not use performance pay.

But within this bigger picture of ambiguity there are some identifiable and contradictory trends.

In economies where teachers are relatively poorly paid, performance-related pay can be associated with improved student performance.

The report says this might suggest that for countries that cannot afford good pay for teachers, such a strategy could have value.

But in countries where teachers’ pay is relatively good, the use of performance pay is linked to poorer performance.

Measuring results

The report also emphasises that performance pay comes in many forms and raises many difficult questions:

How is performance to be reliably and fairly measured? How can an individual teacher’s impact be separated from the contribution of other staff? Should rewards be shared among staff reflecting their collective effort?

And it says that many successful school systems have a wider approach to attracting and rewarding staff.

This can include ensuring the public status of teachers, providing career development and giving teachers professional responsibility.

By Sean Coughlan
BBC News education correspondent

There were 880,000 A-levels awarded - out of 16 million qualifications awarded last year

The annual report on the exam market in England, Wales and Northern Ireland also shows the number of qualifications has doubled to 18,000 in five years.

This includes 300 different A-levels, 250 AS-levels and 800 GCSE options.

Altogether in 2010-11 there were 16 million separate qualifications awarded, including vocational training.

Ofqual’s report shows the scale and cost of the qualifications market in 2010-11 – with the amount spent on exam fees rising by 8.5% on the previous year.

Rising costs

The report shows that the amount spent by schools on exams has increased above inflation every single year since 2002.

This increase has outstripped the rise in school running costs – and means that exam fees have taken a growing proportion of budgets.

The reasons for the sustained increase are suggested as higher fees, more pupils taking exams, more re-sit fees and a shift to pupils taking more expensive exams.

The average A-level fee, the report says, is now about £81 for maths and £93 for French.

Within the total of 16 million qualifications awarded there were 5.5 million GCSEs – drifting downwards from a high point of 6.2m in 2007.

The report suggests that this might be because schools are offering more non-GCSE qualifications.

The number of A-levels awarded has remained a small proportion of the overall total – 880,000, the same as the previous year.

Among the biggest areas of business for the qualifications industry is the wide range of vocational, training and basic skills awards, with eight million qualifications awarded.

There has been a continuing growth in the number of bodies awarding qualifications – rising to 179 from about 100 a decade ago.

A Department for Education spokesman said: “Our reforms to league tables mean that while GCSEs will continue to count, low-quality qualifications that don’t help young people into further study or jobs will be stripped out.”

“We are concerned about the scale of school spending on exams – this is money that could otherwise be spent on teaching.

“Expenditure on exams, including exam fees, is one of the most significant calls on school and college budgets, and has been growing in real terms, as has the percentage of budgets that this represents.”

By Sean Coughlan
BBC News education correspondent

Photo credit: winnfm.com

Minister of Education and Information, Nigel Carty, in an address to participants, reiterated his ministry’s conviction that the 98 percent national literacy rate was based on a traditional method of assessment that did not sufficiently measure comprehension of the subject matter. He emphasized his insistence that new standards be set in place to facilitate an increase in students reading capabilities including the understanding of what they read.

“They must be able to read at and above their grade level with full comprehension of the content,” Carty said, as he revealed deeper issues such as challenges that teachers are facing as they seek to cater to the diverse range of learning difficulties in classrooms.

“A leading US based publisher ‘benchmark education company,’ through its literacy programmes, has sought to address these problems. Its mission to provide classroom tested solutions that help differentiate instruction and enable every student to achieve success, indicates to us that they are committed to developing the skills in teachers to help them prepare properly and effectively to teach our students, thus improving our literacy level,” stated the education minister.

Local education officials felt that the outstanding features of the kindergarten to grade six based content literacy programme qualified it for supplemental use in the Federation’s classrooms. These included continuous assessment of individual students at the start and throughout the school year; as well as the high level of teacher support and interactive technology such as white boards, e-books and online assessments provided by Benchmark.

Director of international sales and marketing at Benchmark Education, Cara Gamberdella, said she works with a wide range of customers throughout the globe ensuring that the materials are culturally appropriate and that educators are versed in the use of the product.

Gamberdella, touting her company’s leadership in the reading industry, explained that their research based resources are used across thousands of classrooms in the United States, Latin America and the Middle East. She highlighted further that independent organizations carry out evaluations on their products and give high marks.

The highly rated Benchmark Programme, as indicated on their materials, prides itself on a carefully graded and consistent sequence that allows students to transition smoothly between levels as well as its self dubbed “gradual release” which moves students from teacher-focussed instruction to independent reading over a period of time.

During the May 2-3 Benchmark workshop, principals, guidance counsellors and education officers were trained on Wednesday, while language arts and reading resource teachers were trained on Thursday in the use of resources.

Special commendation was made to local reading coordinator Jacquelyn Lewis Bassue by Carty for her role in coordinating the Benchmark Content Literacy Workshop.

Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Ionie Liburd-Willett, was present at the ceremony giving her support and expressing her continued commitment to implementing strategic programmes geared at advancing content literacy education.

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