Performance bonuses for high-performing teachers should be shelved, the Productivity Commission has recommended. Victoria is the only state taking part in a pilot pay bonus trial for top teachers, which has been unpopular with teachers.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The federal government unveiled plans last year for a national performance bonus scheme, which will start paying teachers in 2014.
But the commission said the government should introduce that scheme as a temporary measure only, to test whether the scheme would actually work. Any payments should be offered to high-performing teachers only, so the scheme ''does not entrench an expectation that higher certification automatically entitles teachers to higher pay''.
''Early results from these trials, together with the long history of mixed results from the US and elsewhere, suggest that an effective and widely-applicable bonus system is unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future,'' the commission said.
It said a more costly option, but one that should be considered, was to transform teaching from annual pay increments to a ''performance-based career structure''.
The federal president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, welcomed the finding. ''The problem is, it's a one-off reward, a one-off bonus. What we need is a competitive professional salary for all teachers, to attract and retain the teachers that we need.''
The federal School Education Minister, Peter Garrett, said the report recognised reforms the government had begun to recruit and reward talented teachers.
But the report also revisited teacher under-performance, to which it said policy makers paid too little attention. The commission said principals should have the power to fire teachers who failed to lift their game.
