Garrett limbers up for teacher bonus backflip

Reports today have revealed Schools Minister, Peter Garrett is planning to leave Labor’s teacher bonus scheme at the policy altar, said Christopher Pyne, Shadow Minister for Education.

“Mr Garrett is reportedly refusing to commit to rolling out the policy which has been widely derided, including by Labor’s own backbench because of the Government’s plan to use national testing data and a highly complex bureaucratic process to assess teachers,” Mr Pyne said.

“Announced with great fanfare during the election campaign the teacher bonus scheme was a $1.3 billion commitment and the most expensive element of Labor’s campaign education policies,” Mr Pyne said. 

“Under Labor’s plan, a single national performance management system is being developed by bureaucrats in Canberra, based on criteria that would later be used by an agency to identify and assess the teachers.

“The end result under such a plan would inevitably be a rigid set of criteria, assessed by bureaucrats in white coats with clipboards visiting classrooms and checking off a set of pro-forma boxes.

“The best evidence from overseas suggests that a purely centralised approach to rewarding teachers simply doesn’t work.

“The Coalition has long argued that principals and school communities must be given a much stronger say about how they want to run their school, not be entirely removed from the equation.

“The teacher bonus scheme can be added to a long list of policy failures in education, like the under-delivering computers in schools programme, the delayed national curriculum and the suspended trade training centre programme.

November 22, 2011

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