Mick Barling and other Catholic school teachers will protest the concept of performance pay outside South West Coast MP Denis Napthine’s office on Wednesday.
ABOUT 50 Catholic teachers will protest the idea of “performance pay” with a demonstration outside Denis Napthine’s Warrnambool office at 11am on Wednesday.
Emmanuel College teacher Michael Barling said teachers from Catholic schools in the south-west were “appalled” by the notion of performance-based pay due to a number of potential negative ramifications.
“The concept they’re talking about is for will involve a large percentage of teachers not being given automatic pay rises to help finance a small percentage of teachers who are seen as high performance teachers, using some measuring stick, who will get a pay rise,” Mr Barling said.
He said some students may be labelled as “troubled” or “difficult to teach” in order to accurately judge a teacher’s performance.
“As soon as you identify kids as hard to teach so that a teacher’s performance can be measured accordingly, that label will stick to the kid,” Mr Barling said.
“And as soon as you stick a label on a kid, it has a negative impact on the kid.”
He said performance-based pay ignored the fact teaching required a unified approach from teaching staff.
“Rewarding individuals in a team game is highly disturbing to us as teachers,” he said.
“We’ve got no problems with performance appraisal — that can help us adjust and improve our performance.
“It means teachers will stop working with each other, they’ll stop sharing resources and it will create a negative culture within schools.
“We’re appalled that people would see performance pay as an option.”
Fair Work Australia handed down an order saying the union can not organise anything, but Mr Barling said this was an “individual protest action”.
“This is a stack of individual teachers saying we’re not putting up with this,” he said.
“This is nothing to do with wages or conditions — it’s everything to do with caring for our kids.
“This will wreck school cultures and teamwork.”
mneal@standard.fairfax.com.au