Lessons from management–union partnership in teacher performance appraisal in the New South Wales public education system

Abstract

Performance appraisal is frequently seen as one of the hallmarks of the ‘new managerialism’ in public sector human resource management. It is also commonly represented as a device for individualizing the employment relationship. Yet even appraisal offers scope for employee voice/participation, both individually and collectively, and for varying degrees of management–union cooperation. This study examines an unlikely case of management–union partnership in performance appraisal – that applied since 2000 to teachers in Australia's largest public schooling bureaucracy, the NSW Department of Education and Training, whose teachers have a long history of union solidarity and industrial militancy. The experiment can be seen as a union retreat from confrontationism, a concession to managerialism, and a resignation to the dominance of individualism over collectivism. However, we argue that it has also widened the scope for both union and employee voice at workplace level.

Keywords:

• Employee voice
• performance appraisal
• union voice
• management-union partnership
• teacher performance

Notes

1 Details of interviewees and interview codes are given in Table 1. In conformity with university ethics requirements, and to protect interviewee confidentiality, the identities of the districts, schools and interviewees are not disclosed in this study.

2 The NSWTF Executive had actually signalled in-principle acceptance of DET proposals on ‘teacher efficiency’ prior to the re-election of the Carr Labor government in March 1999, but was initially unwilling to enter into any formal agreement on performance management until the Department agreed to provide written undertakings regarding staffing procedures and future staffing levels. However, during the initial stages of the dispute, the union executive abandoned its insistence on staffing guarantees under pressure from sections of its own membership, who argued that non-acceptance would give the government and the Department justification for refusing to negotiate a new salary scale (NSWTF Executive Minutes, 1 June and 16 November 1999; DET, 1999).

3 These aggregate data on programme participants, and that in the following paragraphs, have been supplied to the authors by DET. For reasons of privacy, information of individual participant identity and circumstances was not made available to the authors.