Look twice
Appraising appraisal George Budd describes the introduction of a new and innovative approach to staff development, an appraisal system with staff motivation and development at its heart
For nearly three hundred years, Godolphin has been at the forefront of educational innovation, so when it came to reviewing the staff appraisal process in 2016 we took to our roots and developed an innovative and supportive programme following a thorough staff consultation process. This process was crucial both for both staff buy-in and because no senior management team should be arrogant enough to think that they could possibly have considered everything alone. Since the staff are the people involved in this process, genuine consultation about how it could be further developed, or where any potential pitfalls or problems might lie, is a win-win situation. We began planning next steps with a discussion at a working party. The staff appraisal systems dealing with teachers’ performance that we had all experienced at other schools struck us as being a mixture of ‘carrot and stick’. They were often seen as judgmental by colleagues, due partly to the name and partly to the practice of ‘rating’ staff in lesson observations. The
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Spring 2018
overwhelming majority of teachers are surely in the profession to do a good job, and the strong value-added factor at A-level and GCSE suggests that this is particularly true at Godolphin. It therefore seemed nonsensical to operate an appraisal system which appeared to be intent on tripping up these wonderful teachers and focusing on what they could and could not do. The appraisal document lived with the appraiser rather than the teacher, and so was very much a top-down approach. Surely the whole point of any performance management system is to allow staff to improve their own teaching practice. In my experience, staff are almost always aware of areas they would like to develop further, which makes a top-down approach at best unhelpful and at worst counter-productive. The ubiquitous allocation of the line manager as appraiser is another problem with the traditional performance management system. Whilst this may be of use at times, what if the member of staff and the line manager have similar strengths and areas
