At first, it is a struggle to get your head around it: how can you measure the performance of teachers if you don’t set them any targets to measure against? How can you judge their performance if they don’t present you with direct evidence proving that they have done what you have asked? Even more bewildering, how can you claim to do this without formal observation?

The struggle to fathom such an approach is partly cultural. Schools have become passionate about paper trails, besotted with bureaucracy, attentive to accountability.

So, inevitably, that has seeped into the performance review of teachers. And performance-related pay only adds to this.

But Hiltingbury Junior School in Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire, has managed to find a new way to review teacher performance. Since September 2016, staff have not been set data targets for performance review - a path that other schools are increasingly heading down. But Hiltingbury has pushed this approach even further by having no targets at all.

Burdens of the old system

Traditionally, performance management begins with teachers sitting with a member of the senior leadership team (SLT) at the start of the year to set targets. “In a junior school like ours, a full-time teacher would usually get three targets,” says Sam Hunter, headteacher at Hiltingbury. “If they were upper pay scale or had a teaching and learning responsibility, they would get one more.”

Zara Chambers, head of Year 5, explains that staff had one shared target. They would then pick the others from a list of options that the SLT had advised were appropriate, or they could create their own.

Targets in schools used to be heavily data focused, but, in recent years, some schools have seen the benefit of moving away from just relying on stats, such as x number of children must achieve y, although data is still part of most teachers’ targets.

Hiltingbury completely scrapped data targets two years ago, but it kept teaching objectives. For one teacher, it might have been to “make accurate and productive use of formative and summative assessment to secure the learning and progress for all pupils in reading, writing and maths”. For another, it could have been to “demonstrate effective structuring of mathematics lessons so that all children are supported and challenged”.

Over the course of the year, a teacher might be formally observed once a term. The objectives would be part of that observation if applicable. Then, at the end of the year, the performance review would loom. Many teachers would panic. Firstly, they would have to remember the objectives set 12 months ago. Then they would have to be able to show evidence that they had hit those targets. As you might expect, some teachers were more organised than others.

“You would have some teachers who had collected every scrap of paper over the course of the year and stuck them in a folder, just in case,” says Hunter. “But then you would have others who would panic that they did not have enough evidence and then spend days stressing about collecting everything they could find in the days leading up to the review. Some teachers were stressed because they simply didn’t understand what constituted evidence and what did not.”

Hunter looked at all of this practice and decided that it was a hopeless waste of time. It wasn’t just the teaching hours lost to stress or worries about evidence and the time spent compiling said evidence (amid a workload crisis, Hunter was uncomfortable with the amount of time it was taking some teachers). It was the fact that setting objectives seemed such a reductive way of assessing teaching. The targets were usually either too broad to be meaningful or too narrow to be sensible over the course of a year.

Hunter explains that here were other issues, too, such as “mission creep”. “If you were leading English as part of your job description, and you achieved the aim of consistently good leadership one year, what do you do the next? Increase the aim for that? But if she was achieving everything already, why do I want her to do even more? Over the years, you get this ridiculous escalation.

“But the most depressing issue was that setting objectives was not always embedded in the teaching. It became this thing outside of the teaching, a series of points to hit that didn’t reflect the true nature - the breadth and intricacies - of the teacher’s job. It made no sense.”

Areas of focus

Spotting the problem and finding a better way are obviously two very different things. It took Hunter and her staff some time to find a viable alternative. But when they settled on a new process to put in place for this year, it proved a radical departure.

Teachers at Hiltingbury are no longer set targets. Instead, their performance is assessed against the teaching standards. In the chat at the start of the year, the teacher might indicate which of the standards they would like to focus on most; for example, Chambers wanted to look at differentiation under standard 5, while Fiona Coking, a Year 6 teacher, chose to concentrate on homework in more depth, under standard 4. They then note anything else they want to focus on, but there is no obligation to do so. These are not objectives, but rather areas that the SLT could assist with and that the teacher has set as a focus.

From then on, every teacher in the school is visited by Hunter, head of school Jon Clark, or assistant head Diana Massa, as part of a weekly learning walk.

Each week, the three decide a teaching standard they will be on the look-out for and each teacher is visited with an hour or two’s notice (the standard in question is never shared, as requested by the teachers).

The visit has no set time limit (it could last just five minutes) and if nothing of concern is seen, then no feedback is given. The observers may take notes, and if they do, teachers can request to see them.

If the teaching standard in question is not presented in that lesson because it isn’t relevant, then it’s not a problem - the SLT can look for it next time.

Hour-long interim performance-review meetings follow in January and May to help teachers focus on what they would like to achieve in the term ahead. In these meetings, no file of evidence needs to be presented - members of the SLT have seen for themselves how things are going.

There is no checklist of objectives to review, because there are no objectives. Instead, there is a full hour allotted for a conversation about teaching practice.

At the end of the year, the same thing happens. A discussion about teaching occurs and a judgement is made by the head about whether that teacher has met or exceeded expectations. Those expectations are for great teaching, not meeting four targets.

Burning the paper trail

Chambers admits that, at first, the new approach was daunting.

“You worry, of course, that suddenly there is no paper trail, especially if you are someone used to the comfort of an evidence folder. Judgement against the standards can be seen as more subjective in comparison to that,” she explains. “But then you realise that, actually, the teaching standards are part of assessing your performance, whatever the review method, and this way it is more visible and transparent.”

Indeed, the staff defined what it meant to meet the teaching standards. Over an inset day, each standard was taken in turn and definitions of met standards were agreed. They were then modelled with localised examples from within the school. Likewise, it was reiterated that failure was encouraged, enabling teachers to be free to try new things.

“I wanted to focus on differentiation, and I sat in my interim review and said: ‘I tried this and it didn’t have the impact I wanted. Then I tried this and it still didn’t address the issue. But now I am doing this and it looks promising,’” says Chambers.

“I was not bound by an objective - I could experiment and the process is set up to encourage that.”

Coking agrees: “It feels like we are finally being judged on what we are here to do. The teaching standards are what we are about as teachers, not a few additional objectives. I feel like my whole practice is being assessed, and that I am encouraged to try things and improve, and the whole thing is so much more proactive.”

From the outside, it seems that in many ways the teachers have traded their old system for one that might seem to reduce accountability, but it increases it.

Whereas the teachers previously had to hit three or four targets, suddenly, every aspect of their practice is under the spotlight.

“I guess you could see it that way, but it’s collaborative, they are in control, they set the boundaries and defined what they look like, so it’s really about holding themselves accountable,” says Hunter. “They all had the option to stick to the old system and not one of the class teachers has chosen to do that. Really, we were assessing the whole of teaching under the old system, which made the objectives even more ludicrous. You could have met them all and still not got ‘exceeding’ or ‘met’ because your teaching was poor. This system is much more honest and the assessment of the teaching much better, as we are looking at it weekly, not just once a term through a formal observation.”

Hunter has just finished the first interim reviews. Has she met any kickback?

“Not yet,” she says. “But if there were, we would say ‘OK, show me again, I’ll come to a lesson in a day or two days and you can try to persuade me otherwise’.”

Any serious issues, she says, should have been picked up on the learning walks. If something is amiss, then that is dealt with immediately. So far, this has not happened, but Hunter and Clark have been known to nudge a teacher in a slightly different direction following a walk. “We call it tweak of the week,” says Chambers. “They will ask a question or suggest something, and you know that’s a nudge to adapt or move what you are doing onwards.”

Suitability for struggling schools

As an approach, it is certainly different to what most other schools are doing, according to James Bowen, director of the union for aspiring leaders, NAHT Edge. “Most schools are still setting objectives in the traditional way and usually pupil progress data will form a part of this,” he says.

Could it work in other schools? Hunter would be interested to see whether it would be suitable in a school judged by regulator Ofsted to require improvement, or one placed in special measures.

“We are in a position where we have strong practitioners who are naturally highly reflective, and can accurately assess their strengths and areas for development,” she says. “The new process simply needs to facilitate them having the opportunity to do that. Where practice for an individual requires improvement and they don’t have the capacity to sort this themselves, perhaps the setting of more specific objectives is more helpful. I would be interested to work with other schools on this to see how it could work in different settings.”

Chambers admits that the culture of the schools is integral to the system’s success.

“I think if Sam were to go, we would be a little nervous about how it might work with a different head, but we have trust in the system, so if the new head respected that system, we have every confidence it would work,” she explains.

Fundamentals of evaluation

Can Bowen see more schools working like this, including those judged “requires improvement” or in special measures?

“I’m sure there are plenty of other schools that would be interested in this approach,” he says. “Anything that reduces the need for teachers to collect excessive amounts of evidence for performance-management purposes is certainly worth exploring further. Fundamentally, performance management should be about evaluating the job that teachers are doing rather than adding additional tasks to their already heavy workload.”

In the meantime, Hunter is keen to prove it is successful at Hiltingbury first. Hampshire LA has okayed all legal and HR concerns. She is keen to stress that the system is a work in progress and will undergo a full review at the end of the year. Hunter wants then to expand it to the performance management of support staff. Proof of whether it is the long-term solution of most benefit to staff, and ultimately students, will be seen when it has run for a few years.

“This is by no means the end product; we are still adapting it as we go,” she says. “Some of my fellow heads think I am mad as it can look as though all control has been handed over, but I really do believe in it and we are striving to make it work all the time. Ultimately, it is the best way I have found to make performance reviews better reflect what teachers do. Because of that, I am doing all I can to make it successful.”