The recent rises awarded to TDs under the Buckley report were described by a Government spokesman as the "only established form of benchmarking" in the public sector.
TDs have always got rises through independent commissions. There is nothing new in this. However, these rises were spun to the public, and especially to teachers, as benchmarking, and this is seriously misleading.
What the TDs got in fact was the establishment of an old-fashioned relativity.
The Buckley report now establishes a specific link between the pay of TDs and the pay of principal officers within the public sector. Yet the abolition of cross-sectional relativities within the public service is central to benchmarking. In The Irish Times last Thursday, Paddy Healy is quoted as saying: "The Buckley report on the other hand establishes a new cross-sectoral relativity within the public sector between politicians and principal officers in the Civil Service, the very opposite of the task of the benchmarking body."
In its terms of reference, the benchmarking body is required to carry out research into the pay levels of identifiable groups in the private sector. The agreed benchmarking document states: "The results of the role review and the pay research should have regard to differences between the public service and the private sector, in working conditions, the organisations of work, perquisites, conditions of employment and other relevant bodies." Yet the footnote on page 5 of the Buckley report states that TDs, hospital consultants, the judiciary and State solicitors were exempt from these criteria! The holidays and the expenses of TDs were not taken into account and were specifically excluded in the comparison.
Why were these crucial points not mentioned by the ICTU and Government spokespersons? Would the State as employer adopt the same attitude to 50,000 teachers or 100,000 public servants in its representations to a benchmarking commission? To quote from Buckley: "We are not convinced that there is an adequate appreciation that such comparison would not necessarily result in universal gains. There are winners and losers in the benchmarking approach."
We get an indication that this may be the case as it states in the PPF that "monies, if any, under benchmarking" will be paid. At the ASTI education conference, John Bangs, assistant secretary for education of the NUT in Britain, said that teachers there saw benchmarking as imposing considerable pressure and that there were enormous ministerial pressures in Europe to come up with benchmarking systems.
Mr McCreevy has resisted Europe on other matters; Buckley has excluded politicians from the benchmarking criteria; perhaps Mr McCreevy should look at excluding education from benchmarking.
The ASTI left Congress in January 2000 because the early settlers' 3 per cent award was conditional on signing up to a new agreement, which we were informed was based on performance-related pay (PRP). This was, as outlined in the Fitzpatrick report, to happen at four levels: national, sectoral, local and individual (the last was not to be implemented for a while). The ASTI and the TUI voiced concern about the merit of PRP in education, and the term PRP was dropped and the new term "benchmarking" emerged.
However, in the PPF the final 4 per cent is dependent on the delivery by teachers of the School Plan. This is performance at sectoral level. The School Plan is a wonderful idea, but it has no place in the national agreement which is voted upon by those who do not work in the area of education. This is establishing that change can be introduced into the education area by an industrial-relations agreement rather than by negotiating with the Department of Education and Science.
This could be the precursor of the target-setting which has enslaved the education system in England to measuring, testing, recording - at the expense of creative teaching, voluntary work and extra-curricular activities.
Cash-strapped teachers
The Fitzpatrick report to the Taoiseach recommended that non-core or non-pensionable pay be introduced in the public service. The 1 per cent lump sum in the recently re-negotiated PPF is an example of this. While non-pensionable lump sums, already established in Northern Ireland, may be attractive to cash-strapped teachers, they are even more attractive to governments who want to get their hands on public-service pensions.
Pension parity was broken under the PCW and the retired public servants had to get a written agreement from Mr Ahern in order to get it restored. The long delayed Public Service Commission on Pensions says that there should be a single retirement age at 65. Given the breakdown in society, for many teachers to continue teaching past age 60 would endanger their health and probably even shorten their lives.
Benchmarking is not appropriate for teaching either on education or tradeunion grounds. John Quinn of RTE's Open Mind radio programme was guest speaker at the ASTI convention last Easter. John struck a chord with delegates when he talked about the need for meandering, for taking the long route, for the absolute necessity to stop and stare. Delegates listened attentively when he said, "A lot of teachers are parents too. Somehow amidst all the mad scramble for points, achievement, success, having, you have got to play your part in convincing young people that primarily we are human-beings, not human-doings; human-beings and not human-havings." These sentiments were echoed in the theme of this year's Association of Community Schools conference, "Achieving excellence - Yes! But is there something more?"
Teaching, like parenting, cannot be deconstructed or benchmarked.
