THE threshold pay scheme was introduced to boost the morale of teachers who wanted to stay in the classroom. But it seems to be having the opposite effect on those who have recently gone back into state schools after teaching abroad, in further education or in the independent sector.

Teachers who fall into these categories often discover that they are barred from threshold assessment only after completing the time-consuming application process.

The Department for Education and Skills guidance says that threshold assessment is open to those who are legally covered by the School Teachers’

Pay and Conditions document and have reached point 9 on the salary scale for qualified classroom teachers. The guidance also refers teachers back to the pay and conditions document if they are in unusual circumstances or are not clear about their eligibility.

This 138-page tome is available on the DFES website, but as former FE lecturer Ian Linden points out, not many people will plough through it when they have a much shorter and apparently clear guidance booklet to go by. Mr Linden applied for the threshold this year after carefully reading the eligibility criteria in the booklet. The head of the school for emotionally and behaviourally disturbed children where he is key stage 4 co-ordinator agreed that he could apply. It was only after Mr Linden had submitted his application that an external assessor told him that he was ineligible as he had not taught under teachers’ pay and conditions for two out of the past five years.

“My big error, it appears, was working in an FE college between 1989 and 1999,” says Mr Linden, whose 22 years’ full-time teaching experience includes a previous nine-year stint in a local education authority secondary school.

“In this current recruitment crisis, especially within the sector I work, I would have thought a more positive attitude to the retention and rewarding of experienced staff such as myself would have existed. But I now feel that my previous experience is not valued.”

Another teacher who complains about the quality of the DFES guidance returned to the state sector in September 2000 after 15 years in an independent school. With her headteacher’s support, she submitted her threshold application last October. In February this year she received a letter from an external assessor setting out the evidence she would have to produce to show that she had met the eight national threshold standards.

After spending many hours compiling this evidence, she discovered, just two days before the assessor’s visit, that she was ineligible for the assessment because she had not taught in a maintained school for two of the past five years.

“If I’d known that, I would not have applied this year. I would have left it until next year,” she said.

Paradoxically, threshold assessment is open to teachers in those independent schools which have opted into the threshold scheme.

“We have had members who have worked in the independent sector, come into the state sector and then found out they could not apply. The worst thing is that if they had stayed in the independent sector and their school was part of the threshold scheme, they could have applied,” says Val Shield, a national official with the Association of Teachers and Lecturers.

But at least former independent school or FE teachers are eligible to cross the threshold once they have gained the necessary amount of recent state school experience. Supply teachers employed by agencies, on the other hand, are not entitled to threshold payments, This means that experienced supply teachers such as Stephen Dalton, who have passed the threshold assessment, lose their right to stay on the upper pay scale if they sign up with a private agency.

Mr Dalton did not choose to work in the private sector. He would have kept his threshold pay had he been able to work directly for a school or LEA. But he was forced to seek work through an agency after Salford LEA, his previous employer, disbanded its supply pool. Having had to accept what is effectively a pay cut, he is one teacher whose morale has certainly not been raised by going through the threshold.

A DFES spokeswoman said there were no plans to revise either the rules on supply teachers’ eligibility or the guidance on the threshold process.

“The guidance is clear and covers the vast majority of teachers,” she said. “It also says explicitly that in unusual cases people should refer to the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions document.”

Further information at www.dfes.gov.ukteachingreformsrewards

DO YOU QUALIFY?

Threshold assessment is open to:

* permanent and supply teachers employed by LEAs or governing bodies of maintained schools who have worked in the state sector for two of the past five years;

* teachers who are not covered by the pay and conditions document, but are employed by city academies, city technology colleges, non-maintained special schools and education action zone forums;

* teachers employed by private bodies, such as children’s charities to work with local authority-supported children of statutory school age;

* teachers employed by independent schools - so long as they have qualified teacher status, at least seven years’ post-qualification experience and their school has signed up to the threshold scheme.

Threshold assessment is not open to supply teachers employed by private agencies. Market forces have led some agencies to offer their teachers an upper pay scale salary, but they are under no obligation to do so.