Only one teacher in pay-performance trial

A TEACHER performance-pay trial funded by the federal government had just one participant.

A TEACHER performance-pay trial funded by the federal government had just one participant -- who was assessed and declared "high-performing" after "reflective writing" exercises.

The solo pilot program, conducted in the Victorian independent school sector, received funding under the government's Smarter Schools National Partnerships initiative, which allocates money for hundreds of teacher-quality and literacy and numeracy projects.

The Auditor-General, Ian McPhee, recently questioned the $322 million program, saying it had failed to produce any improvements over three years and did not have sufficient mechanisms to measure success.

Victoria's 2011 annual report on the program reveals the outcome of the independent sector's Rewarding High-Performing Teachers pilot, which had 20 interested schools when it began in January last year.

The report says 20 schools attended a briefing and two schools, with one teacher each, expressed interest before one dropped out.

The Victorian government said the independent sector received $4.61m in federal funding for a number of improving teacher-quality projects and it "makes its own decisions on how to spend its national partnership funding".

A spokesman for the Association of Independent Schools Victoria defended the pilot, saying it would help inform a joint project with government and Catholic schools to develop a fair process to recognise high-performing teaching.

"We have demonstrated what educational experts in all sectors agree: describing high-quality teaching is difficult," he said. "However, the value of the pilot is that it is providing important data on what is required for a rigorous process to determine a reliable measure."

The spokesman said there was considerable work and time involved in the pilot. "We explained how rigorous the process would be and some schools did not feel that they could commit the time and effort," he said.

The solo trial comes after Mr McPhee found the annual reports provided by the states for progress on the projects funded under the national partnerships did not coincide with the reporting cycle of the National Assessment Plan -- Literacy and Numeracy, so it was hard to measure success against any common benchmarks.

"The large majority of the states' reports have included information about implementation milestones and activities, while few reported achievement against reform targets," he said.