Testing Teachers: What works best for teacher evaluation and appraisal

Foreword Good schools are essential if we are to make the most of the talents and abilities of all our young people. There is now widespread acceptance among researchers within the UK and internationally that good teaching is at the heart of good schools, and must therefore be at the heart of any school improvement programme. In recent years, both the Coalition and Labour governments have focused heavily on improving the quality of new teachers entering the profession. Programmes like Teach First, the Graduate Teacher Programme and more recently, School Direct, and a series of Golden Hello and bursary schemes have improved the standing of teaching as a profession and encouraged more good graduates to consider teaching as a career. But, with 440,000 teachers in English classrooms, and 35,000 new teachers recruited each year, it is not enough simply to raise the quality of new teachers. It is more important to raise the standard of those already in the classroom, many of whom will be working with young people for decades to come. There have already been significant changes in the flexibilities open to academies and other schools in how they appraise and evaluate teachers. Appraisal has been freed up. All schools are likely to have the chance to link pay for teachers more closely to their performance in the classroom rather than length of service in the future. When the Labour government first introduced performance related pay in the late 90s, it did so within a very bureaucratic framework that failed to achieve its goals of linking extra rewards to the best performance in most schools. Michael Gove is removing many of those restrictions, and is hoping that doing so will mean schools feel free to use appraisal and evaluation to achieve real improvement and reward the best teachers more effectively. A Sutton Trust survey of teachers last year showed growing support for doing so. But unless schools and their leaders develop their own clear appraisal standards, there is every danger that the extra freedoms will be no more effective than what went before. There is now much more powerful research on effective evaluation than ever before, and that's why this report from Richard Murphy from the London School of Economics for the Sutton Trust is so important. He has looked at the latest evidence from the US and UK on teacher evaluation and produced a useful analysis and …