Making performance related pay (PRP) a fair and transparent process sounds straightforward, but it can be tricky. Whether you are coming to the end of your appraisal cycles or have already started a new cycle, ensuring that PRP is less of a challenge is something you can focus on throughout the academic year. We have identified four categories that will help you address PRP in your school.

How can this be achieved?

• Communication– staff members and managers need easy and effective ways to communicate regularly, face-to-face meetings are important.

• Objectives Focus – considering objectives at all times is not always easy, but they should be a consistent focus.

• Evidence – it can be a last minute scramble to gather evidence from various different places before an appraisal meeting so central storage is a must.

• Support – it is not always easy to ask for help or to recognise that someone needs support, but identifying and enabling this is key to supporting staff.

The trick (if you can call it that) is to ensure that there are no surprises for staff or line managers by the time you get to a PRP discussion. The whole process should be clear and transparent. This helps to avoid any awkward conversations which no one wants to have.

On the other hand, it also makes it easy to recognise and reward those staff who are achieving their goals throughout the year. This and all of the above helps staff to feel valued and supported which is something we all appreciate from our employers.

Our performance management software SchooliP can help with all of the above and has a proven track record of ensuring the four ways to make PRP less challenging.

• Communication – the SchooliP blog tool makes it easy to communicate when a face to face meeting is not possible, plus all dialogue can be recorded within the system, ensuring that previous conversations can be revisited if required.

• Objectives Focus – SchooliP encourages staff to review objectives throughout the year, they are empowered to achieve their own objectives and to manage their own performance.

• Evidence – SchooliP allows staff to upload evidence directly to their performance portfolio including images and videos from any device (PC, mobile or tablet).

• Support – SchooliP helps leaders to support their staff, providing them with different channels to communicate and making it easily accessible to see where each staff member is in terms of their objectives. The teachers’ standards can be used here as a framework to measure performance and competence.

We hope that you have found this article helpful. SchooliP is the simplest and most effective way to manage teacher and staff appraisal in schools. Elevating the status of performance management enables performance related pay discussions to be a transparent and fair process.