MANAGING TEACHER APPRAISAL AND PERFORMANCE. Edited by David Middlewood and Carol Cardno. Routledge. Falmer pound;16.

Whoever has the task of dreaming up teachers’ job titles has a great sense of humour. What on earth is a middle manager? Is it a role between senior management and junior management? Or is it a fancy title ladled out to give false status but changing nothing? Peter Fleming and Max Amesbury give the game away in the subtitle of their book - “a guide to effective subject, year and team leadership”.

The Art of Middle Management in Primary Schools is a useful guide to basic management theory, well laced with illustrative examples - an interesting read for teachers applying for or new to a responsibility post. There is good coverage of leadership styles and management skills ranging from team-building to administration and resource management.

Perhaps the most difficult task for any school manager is monitoring the performance of other teachers. Fleming and Amesbury have a chapter on this, but readers will need to look elsewhere for a thorough exploration of the issues and the skills needed to do it well.

They need look no further than Managing Teacher Appraisal and Performance. Anyone interested in school management, from newly appointed post holders to experienced heads and performance management advisers looking over their shoulders to see if they’ve got it right, will find this book informative and useful.

The 12 contributors are academics drawn from around the world who look at the influence that teacher appraisal has on school leadership and teacher development. There is also some gazing into the future. All chapters are pretty good and nearly all the writers manage to avoid academic-speak.

The book maintains a sharp focus, reflecting high standards on the part of the editors, whose introduction is a good scene-setter. The purpose, effects and limitations of accountability systems are well described and the effectiveness of assessment models solely based on measurable outcomes is questioned.

Wayne L Edwards shares interesting views on the ethical issues surrounding appraisal. John West Burnham’s chapter on headteachers raises the issue of the “magic” factor in leadership - what John MacBeath and Kate Myers refer to in their book Effective School Leaders as “the X factor - the surprise, the chemistry, the shift in perspective that doesn’t fit the arithmetic but brings a magical quality to leadership”. The greatest reward in teaching is that magic lesson - the star performance that stands out. That mechanistic models of simple checklists are inappropriate for evaluating the magic is a theme that appears throughout the book.

In the final chapter, David Middlewood proposes more sophisticated methods - such as 360-degree feedback, in which perspectives from a variety of audiences, including managers, colleagues, pupils and parents, are fed into the appraisal.

MIKE SULLIVAN