With the deadline for a national pay agreement looming, teachers and parent groups are waiting to see what the final text may contain for the education sector.
Both will want to read the section relating pay to improved services with special interest. Even before publication, this section's potential contents have prompted two of the three teacher unions to threaten industrial action.
Parents may be incredulous that an apparently innocuous idea - that some part of a teacher's salary be determined by classroom performance - has triggered such reaction. Many will see little wrong with a concept where teachers improve their classroom performance in exchange for a few extra pounds in their pay packet. Their natural concern will be for their children's education and many will like the idea of teachers having their pay determined by the exam results. The Government proposal on this issue does not involve individual assessment, according to sources. The phrase being used by those involved in the national pay talks is "performance-management system".
Nevertheless, the resistance of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI) and the Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) to the idea may be seen by many pa rents as the latest stalling tactic by the profession against accountability in the classroom.
With a minimal level of inspection at secondary level and few options open to parents for getting rid of poor teachers, parents claim the classroom is impregnable to the outside world.
The majority of teachers do not see it like that. Their union representatives say discussions of performance as related to pay and accountability must take place against the background of a profession brought low by poor pay, unrecognised work and declining status.
ASTI members point out that the most important issue should be their "early settlers" pay claim, not pay as related to performance. That claim arises because secondary teachers settled early in the last national pay round and the union believes they have thus fallen behind other public sector groups by more than 5 per cent. Teachers resent the link between that claim and the issue of performance and pay. "We are being told we can only get the early-settlers' money if we accept some form of performance-related pay in the future. That is a bridge too far," a senior teacher union source said at the weekend.
A wider point made by teachers about performance-related pay is that concepts first pioneered in the commercial world do not necessarily translate seamlessly into the educational world. "The crude measurements of the market do not work in the sphere of education," said one teacher this week.
However, the amount of research done in Ireland on how the idea might affect education is negligible. The language involved - "agreed benchmarks" and "team-working" - is so vague that even the teachers' unions have taken different meanings from what they have heard so far. While the INTO general secretary, Senator Joe O'Toole, says there are opportunities to exploit in such a system, the ASTI and TUI remain steadfast in their opposition.
THE president of the ASTI, Ms Bernadine O'Sullivan, says it is not possible "to measure and evaluate the relationship between teacher and student. If students come from broken homes where little value is put on education and they don't do their homework and miss school regularly, how do you include that in the equation?"
When it is boiled down, though, the problem teachers have with the idea is that their work could be assessed individually. "We utterly oppose any system involving individual appraisal of teachers' work," the president of the TUI, Mr Joe Carolan, has said.
The possibility of this appraisal being based on grades contained in the Leaving and Junior Certificate examinations enrages teachers even more. The Government and the ICTU, however. have emphasised repeatedly that "payment by results" is not being contemplated.
They are said to be close to agreeing a national pay deal and there is no doubt some form of performance-related scheme will be included. However, the chairman of ICTU's public services committee, Mr Peter McLoone, has stressed that "individualised" performance-related pay is not on the table.
So if the idea which teachers find so repugnant is not even on the table, what is all the fuss about? Well, the fuss has come about for two reasons.
First, many leading members of the ASTI and the TUI simply do not accept the assurances of the ICTU that a system of individualised performance-related pay is not being brought in as part of the new national pay deal. The anger of ASTI members at what they say has been the failure by the ICTU to advance their "early-settlers" claim has increased this lack of trust.
Second, many leading ASTI and TUI members believe that even a non-individualised system could ruin education in future decades.
Documents seen by The Irish Times and confirmed by Government sources say the two sides in the national pay talks are close to agreeing a "performance-management system". The documents say this will involve "statements of strategy" and "service delivery plans".
Translated, this means groups of teachers sitting down with school managements and agreeing to participate in a process that will raise the performance level of the school. In other words, there will be no individual assessment of the work of teachers, but there will be a collective process in which strengths and weaknesses are identified.
While parents may regard this as another missed opportunity to introduce an element of accountability into the classroom, some ASTI and TUI members claim even this proposal could contain dangers and they may resist it.
They say if the school itself is the unit judged, the school principal will be the one who takes the flak if performance is deficient; in other words, instead of individual assessment of teachers, the system would involve individual assessment of principals.
