Best Practice

Approaches to performance-related pay

Pay and conditions
Will performance-related pay affect staff relationships? Christopher Woolfrey looks at what school leaders think about the controversial policy and how they are preparing.

In September, the government introduced several changes to the way teachers in maintained schools are paid. Most significantly, pay increases must now be related to performance.

What impact will this have on pupils and on teachers? The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Toolkit, which reviews studies on the effects of different interventions on pupil progress, says that the evidence on performance-related pay is inconclusive.

Cross-national comparisons suggest a small positive effect, although other studies on average find no impact. 

Meanwhile, the World Bank’s review of studies on performance-related pay in the public sector finds that studies on teaching “often show a low degree of satisfaction with bonus systems and explicit evaluation”.

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