Performance Management in Education: Improving Practice

Published in Association with the British Educational Leadership and Management Association

This series of books published for BELMAS aims to be directly relevant to the concerns and professional development needs of emergent leaders and experienced leaders in schools. The series editors are Professor Harry Tomlinson, and Dr Hugh Busher, School of Education, University of Leicester.

Titles include:

Performance Management in Education: Improving Practice (2002) By Jenny Reeves, Christine Forde, Jim O'Brien, Pauline Smith and Harry Tomlinson

Strategic Management for School Development: Leading your schools improvement strategy (2002)

By Brian Fidler

Subject Leadership and School Improvement (2000)

By Hugh Busher and Alma Harris with Christine Wise

School Improvement After Inspection? School and LEA responses Edited by Peter Earley

Living Headship: voices, values and vision (1999)

Edited by Harry Tomlinson

School Culture (1999)

Edited by Jon Prosser

Policy, Leadership and Professional Knowledge in Education (1998)

Edited by Michael Strain, Bill Dennison, Janet Ousten and Valerie Hall

Managing Continuous Professional Development in Schools (1997)

Edited by Harry Tomlinson

Choices for Self-managing schools: autonomy and accountability (1997)

Edited by Brian Fidler

This exciting and timely book explores the development and developing understandings of performance in England and Wales and Scotland. This use of two of the administrative units within the British Isles allows authors and readers to draw comparison between two different approaches to education – the Scottish system of education has been independent of that of England and Wales for many years. In doing so they raise a critical debate about central government and other authorities search for ‘best practice’ models that will somehow be able to fit all situations and locations, by pointing out that successful practice may take many forms depending on what values policy-makers privilege. They also importantly argue that performance management need not necessarily be linked to pay and point out how Scottish and English and Welsh policy diverge on this issue.

Early in the book the authors acknowledge the differences of approach between managerial and professional perspectives on performance management. They make it clear that although they understand the values that have driven the introduction of managerialist perspectives of performance management to education, they consider that professional approaches allow for equal rigour of accountability and have the advantage of encouraging teachers to be personally professionally engaged with constantly monitoring their standards of work. In this testing regime of action learning they perceive mentors having a key role in supporting teachers and helping them review critically their working practices.

The book focuses on what is essentially a modernist project, rather than a post modern or post structural one. The authors focus on the growth of social structures to promote professional development, pointing out how difficult it is for teachers to sustain personal development if there is insufficient formal and informal support for it. Helpfully, one chapter traces the development of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) provision in England and Wales and Scotland, setting an important policy context in which, and sometimes against which, teachers have struggled to improve the quality of their performance. It leads the authors into a discussion of the importance of competence-based or standards-based approaches to defining teacher performance. While they acknowledge that such approaches [Page vii]risk being narrow and behaviourist they indicate how they can be broadened to incorporate understandings of values and indicate that such approaches can bring greater coherence to planning and managing the improvement of teachers' performance. So do views that teachers can successfully and rigorously exercise control of their professional practices and development elide noiselessly into concern for the effective if subtle management or control of teachers through ‘soft’ human resources development, a system that, of course, stands in contradiction to professional autonomy.

However, the modernist project of performance management is attenuated, as the authors acknowledge. They note the recent renewed interest in and sponsorship by the English and Welsh central government of teachers' engagement in research to explore good practice in schools, and argue that it is further emphasis on work-based learning that is the key to the full potential value of CPD for teachers. If the parameters against which to make judgements of what constitutes good practice for teachers, and senior and middle level leaders and managers in schools too, are now set by central government through its agencies, the processes of collecting evidence of practice rigorously through observation and other methods, giving feedback by observer to practitioner, and discussion of performance and how to improve it allows teachers of all qualities at a local level to re-assert professional control over their development. It is how practitioners make sense of their experiences and engage with professionally held and developed understandings of effective practice, including processes of change and the modifications in practice that they implement, that ultimately leads to sustained change, whatever intrinsic and extrinsic motivation spurs them to undertake professional development in the first place.

As well as reviewing the key issues and concepts underpinning the tensions inherent in successful professional development, the authors also set out a clear programme for implementing effective performance management, while noting that the transplantation of practice from commercial sector businesses to public sector services is neither straightforward nor as easy to achieve successfully as is sometimes naively proclaimed. Nonetheless they argue the importance of trying to manage teacher professional development successfully to improve students' opportunities for learning. To achieve this, they suggest senior and middle leaders in schools need to foster a culture of learning, amongst staff as well as among students, and build teachers' capacity to carry out effective professional development. The professional development itself needs to focus actively and rigorously on the evaluation and improvement of practice. However, unless the [Page viii]social and organisational systems in schools and local authorities, and central government policy and funding also enable such approaches to performance management these will not be successful.

So the book moves back and forth, as a successful book on education leadership and management should, between the macro external policy contexts and the micro internal organisational processes of leadership, management and practice and reflections on practice by individual practitioners, showing how these different levels of action and sense making by participants in the action are interconnected. The success of teacher professional development cannot be divorced from its organisational contexts, and the impact of performance management has to be understood in both its policy contexts and those of the individual practitioners' perceptions of it. Similarly the purposes of performance management through professional development have to be understood within two frameworks, that of control and accountability – ensuring that teachers and school leaders perform adequately to support effective and inclusive student learning, and that of adaptability – empowering school leaders and teachers to respond flexibly to changing situations and students' needs while maintaining successful approaches to effective learning.