School Principals and Recent Federal Government Chat About Education Spending

I heard the Federal Minister for Education talking about two funding directions:  one being performance pay for teachers and the other a focus on early childhood education.

Performance pay for teachers? Not a new idea and has a lot of pitfalls. I even got a performance pay boost back in the old days of the annual teaching mark awarded by the dreaded school inspectors. So what!  Once you achieved a certain mark you jumped two to three salary grades.  Surely at secondary school level to achieve a Senior Teacher position and the commensurate higher salary is performance based?

The performance pay is supposed to encourage expert teachers to remain as teachers rather than seek school administrative jobs.  Let them become school principals with greater scope to influence teaching practice.  We need all school principals to have been gun teachers.

I hope if performance pay comes about we see recognition as a gun teacher one who brings a Leopard (see earlier post) along to year 7 maths mastery when that Leopard is in year 9 by age.

As a principal I would rather see more money targeted to effective in-service that enables my whole teaching staff to become even more expert.

My standards moderation approach cited in previous posts is an ideal in-service platform for teachers to share how they go about things.

Testing the little ones on school entrance to see what they need?  I always believed we should do this as a normal part of our teaching.  We get them in at pre-primary and find out from all available sources where they are at.  Formal diagnostic testing can be one source if needed.  The federal Minister for Education sees this as a pillar for the attainment of better results in mathematics and literacy attainment as part of the national picture.  When the overall school attainment picture looks bleak according to the pollies they bring out this refocusing on early childhood education.  We've been there and done it and continue to do it.  It beggars belief when we in the schools know that we are on full throttle for every child as soon as they enter our school.  I wish Ministers of Education would recognise that teaching is a profession which means we are working at our best day in and day out and as professionals we accept the responsibility to keep up to date with best practice.


What do you think?

GD