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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-09-29 Daily Xml
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TEACHERS, PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Ms FOX (Bright) (14:16): My question is to the Minister for Education. Can the minister advise the house of reforms aimed at improving the performance and esteem of teachers in our public schools?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Minister for Education, Minister for Early Childhood Development, Minister for Science and Information Economy) (14:16): I thank the honourable member for her question. She, of course, as a former teacher appreciates the significance of the quality of teaching. It is the single most important factor that makes a difference in our schools for our children's learning. I am pleased to announce to the house today that the government has released a new performance development and management policy aimed at ensuring the highest standards within our teaching profession within our public schools.

The policy is directed at those two matters: obviously, lifting performance, making sure that we take the performance that exists in our schools and make it the best it can be, but it is also a policy concerning the management of poor performance, which is equally important. The new policy will ensure a culture of performance development in our schools, but it will also make it easier for principals to address any concerns with underperforming staff. The single most important way of addressing performance in any workplace, but certainly in schools, is to make sure that the feedback is regular, informal and based on quality data. That is the way you lift performance in any organisation, and that is what we are doing in our schools.

The new policy provides for better planning for teacher development, more tailored personal learning, and more feedback for teachers about their performance. We know that the overwhelming majority of our teachers do a great job inspiring our children and students to stretch themselves, but by providing a more systematic performance development process to support them we can do better. We know that in the past classrooms certainly became very private places where teachers were really left to carry on with their students without the guidance that I think is really appropriate for lifting performance.

As we have now gone down this path of having more detailed discussions about how children learn and the performances that make a difference to students are drawn to the attention of teachers, we can see that this is an incredibly powerful way of enthusing our teaching workforce. Many teachers who have been doing wonderful things for years are being recognised. Other teachers who for a long time have been doing the same thing that has not been working are being given assistance to lift their performance.

The new policy provides for greater flexibility so that interventions can be tailored to individual circumstances. One of the things that we had in the old system was a performance management process that was way too long. Not only was it debilitating for the principal seeking to use it but it was equally debilitating for the teachers who were subjected to it, so that was in no-one's interest. It certainly meant that often we were left with underperforming teachers in schools, which simply detracted from the morale of our schools, and we also found that it was very difficult for principals to operate in that environment.

What they did, of course, was to use the 10-year rule to simply empty those teachers out into the central placement pool. What people knew, then, about the central placement pool was that that was the place where you might find a teacher who was not up to scratch, so nobody would advertise, and people were put on a series of short-term contracts. That is why we got rid of the 10-year rule, because it had a very important relationship to this question of performance management.

We do now have a much better performance management process. Of course, it builds in natural justice (as you would expect) for those teachers. It removes the requirement for a panel of observers, recognising that the principal is the educational leader in the school setting and so should have the discretion on how best to identify performance and address that performance in a particular case, and to make sure that we do these two very important things, that is, lift good performance and turn it into outstanding performance but also have an intolerance for poor performance.

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