The industrial logjam holding our children back

WHILE the change in parliamentary Speaker was drowning other news, the Gillard government quietly dropped its promised teacher bonus scheme. Axing this clumsy add-on to the existing teacher salary structures was sensible, but the principle of merit pay remains essential to improving our schools.

Wholesale reform is required. The existing system straitjackets teacher pay in such a way that our lowest performing teachers are paid the same as high performing teachers.

A remuneration structure based purely on tenure would be fine if there was little or no difference in teacher quality. But the differences are stark: Australian National University research shows that a student taught by a teacher in the top 10 per cent learns at twice the rate as a student with a bottom 10 per cent teacher.

The problem with the government's scheme was that it was too narrow (a one-off bonus of up to $8100) and would be administered centrally, when what is required is flexibility for school principals to manage the teacher workforce in the same way as any other leader of a large organisation. That is, control over recruitment, salaries and performance management.

The Productivity Commission's Schools Workforce draft report released earlier this month provides a blueprint of some of the basic reforms necessary.

It starts with recruitment. Principals must have the power to recruit the appropriate people for their school. This largely occurs in the southern states (due to reforms of previous Coalition governments) but is almost non-existent in NSW and Queensland. No leader of any organisation, but particularly a people-based one, can guarantee the quality of their service unless he or she can manage their workforce and recruit the best for their organisation. Schools are no different.

Second, there needs to be differentiated pay within the teaching profession, and this needs to be administered at the school level. This is not just about bonuses, but concerns the pace of career advancement and the ability to offer higher salaries to attract teachers in hard to staff subjects.

Many schools have a shortage of maths and science teachers, so they should be able to offer higher salaries for such teachers as one method of attracting them.

A key part of a school leader's ability to reward teachers is his or her ability to manage the teacher appraisal system.

Yet the government is moving in the opposite direction by developing a highly centralised system of teacher professional standards. The Teacher Standards will require each of Australia's 250,000 teachers to be centrally assessed against broad statements across 37 categories. According to Education Department officials, each category is likely to have three to four sub-categories, adding to an incredible 100 to 150 broadly worded assessment criteria for each teacher, all done independently of the school principal.

It will be a mountain of paperwork for little impact.

The final required reform is the ability for principals to lay off consistent underperforming teachers.

Ben Jensen from the Grattan Institute finds that Australian students would be the top performing students in the world, beating Finland and Hong Kong if the bottom 14 per cent of teachers were replaced with merely average teachers.

Despite this powerful lever to put Australian schools at the top, and to change the trajectory of thousands of children, principals in state schools have almost no power to fire underperformers.

A Boston Consulting Group study in 2003 found that only 0.15 per cent of Victorian teachers, for example, were rated as unsatisfactory in their performance appraisal in any given year.

Yet, the school principals felt that up to 20 per cent were "significant underperformers".

This is not just an issue for principals and students, but for teachers also.

Three-quarters of lower-secondary teachers report that in their school, teachers with "sustained poor performance are not dismissed".

The Rudd-Gillard government's education revolution is coming to very little.

Reforms that are supposedly of vital importance -- bonus pay, national curriculum, national teacher standards -- are being scrapped, delayed, or are overly bureaucratic.

A real revolution must constantly improve teacher quality, the decisive measure for improving student outcomes.

Fixing the teacher industrial system is vital to this. Let principals recruit the best, pay and promote according to merit and fire underperformers.

And watch student results soar.

Alan Tudge is the federal Liberal member for Aston and a member of the Parliamentary Education and Employment Committee.