Why Teacher Appraisal Systems Fail (And What Actually Works)

Australian schools already have the framework for fair, individualised teacher appraisal. Here's why most leaders aren't using it, and what to do instead.

Hayley Laney- Teaching Futures

8/2/20266 min read

Two women are having a conversation at a desk.
Two women are having a conversation at a desk.

I started my career in the corporate world, banking specifically, after finishing my Business degree in management. I was always curious why people found performance reviews so daunting. My belief was tied to integrity: if you're doing your best, then asking for feedback and working with colleagues to improve is not an arduous task.

Then I moved into education, where there was little to no performance culture at all. It was years before I had my first official performance and development conversation.

As a leader now, I try to prioritise these conversations, not because staff underperform, but because teaching is isolating in an unusual way. You can work alongside the same people every day and still have almost no real professional conversation about your practice. You are learning constantly, testing things in your classroom, adjusting, but rarely given the time or structure to actually assess what any of it is producing.

This is not lost on the system itself. An OECD survey, cited inside AITSL's own 2012 framework, found that 63 per cent of Australian teachers report that appraisal of their work is largely done to fulfil administrative requirements. The same framework goes further, warning that "excessive attention to process is a common feature of less successful approaches." This is not a teacher complaint. It is the national framework naming its own failure.

My early experience matched this exactly. Genuine conversations about performance rarely happened, what got recorded instead was a checklist of goals set by the site or sector's priorities, not a true reflection of my ability or the impact I was having. The real conversations about my practice only started once I was certified as a Highly Accomplished Teacher. That's not a requirement for every teacher, and I don't think it should be, but the certification process was what finally made me reflect on my teaching in a way I could actually understand and narrate, measured against something tangible, not against the output of my colleagues or a uniform standard of what "good" is meant to look like.

Part of the problem is that there is no single definition of what a "good" teacher looks like, yet appraisal systems are built as though there is. Layered on top of that, performance evaluation and performance development are two different jobs, and bundling them into one conversation creates conflict. Cleveland, Murphy and Williams (1989) showed this in their research on multiple, competing uses of performance appraisal, when the same process is used to rank or judge, genuine reflective practice does not happen. Elliott's (2015) work confirms the same pattern in Australian schools specifically, developmental intent quietly gets subsumed by accountability, for both the person being appraised and the person doing the appraising.

I have sat on both sides of that table. As a teacher, I hid the gaps in my own practice for fear of being flagged as underperforming rather than supported to improve. As a leader, I have watched teachers squirm over a goal they hadn't quite met, wanting real guidance on how to get there, while the system's only real demand was that the form be completed and filed.

Part of this comes down to who is actually in the room. Performance management in schools is rarely run by high-performing teams built for the purpose. Middle leaders are often handed these conversations with little to no training in how to observe, reflect, or advise, they are asked to run a developmental process without ever being equipped to deliver one, or to be able to adequately provide the resources to support the development. If the person holding the conversation hasn't been given the tools to develop anyone, the conversation was never going to be developmental in the first place.

So the system reaches for something that looks more objective instead, student results. But this is where appraisal is on its shakiest ground. Good teaching has been linked to gains in student achievement, but the way we measure that success is deeply flawed. No student starts from the same point, no student has the same opportunities, and not everyone's idea of success looks the same. Marks (2017) shows the link between student results and school quality is inherently unstable once other factors are properly accounted for. Underneath that is a bigger question, is education there to develop thinking and process, or to recite knowledge and follow a formula to a correct answer? Personally, the students I remember most fondly were rarely the ones with the highest grades. They were the ones who became curious, who could see the process and the journey, we were learning and growing together.

I wanted to grow in my teaching, but once I reached the top tier of the pay scale, the only recognised way to grow further was through leadership, which meant leaving the classroom. So when I applied for Highly Accomplished Teacher certification, it was because it was the only avenue available to me that actually reflected on classroom practice rather than pulling me out of it. I wanted to show my growth and support other teachers in theirs. What I found in this process was the amount of administration with no real follow up on teacher practice that actually goes on, where excellence in teaching is not rewarded, nor is it actually shown or highlighted as good practice. We had become a homogeneous group, tracked by years in the profession rather than by our own in class research or the impact of what we were actually doing. The HAT process gave me the opposite of that, a genuinely reflective, satisfying professional experience, built around my own evidence rather than a template.

And yet leadership remained the only visible track to actually grow. If you wanted more from the profession, moving up was the only option on offer, there was no equivalent path that let you deepen your practice as a teacher and be recognised for it without leaving the classroom behind. That's how I ended up on the other side of the table, running the same appraisals I once found so hollow.

None of this had to be a forced choice between staying in the classroom or growing at all. AITSL's own standards, under APST 6.1, already frame identifying and planning your professional learning needs as a professional responsibility, not an administrative box to tick. International research backs this up, Dal Corso et al. (2019) found that when teachers perceive their appraisal as fair and individualised, it predicts higher job performance, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction. This in turn has improved outcomes for students. None of this requires a new system. It requires running the one we already have.

What this actually requires is not complicated. Teachers need mentorship at every career stage, not only at the beginning. Reflective practice needs to be built in as both an individual habit and a shared, collaborative one, not an annual form. And critically, the person mentoring a teacher's growth should not be the same person judging their performance, keeping those roles separate is what lets a teacher actually admit where they're struggling, rather than managing what gets seen.

We individualised learning, but only for students. Teachers are not a homogenous group either, and we don't run on raw data any more than they do. We cannot fix the person in front of us like a machine, but we can change the operating procedure around them, so the system stops working against the same people it's meant to develop, and starts pointing at the same goal.

This is where Strong Start Partners comes in. If your appraisal process is still running as a compliance exercise dressed up as development, the fix isn't a new policy, it's separating who mentors your staff from who evaluates them, and building the individualised, standards-linked conversations APST 6.1 already asks for. If you want help building that structure into your school rather than bolting on another form, book a conversation about Strong Start Partners and let's talk about what it looks like for your staff.

References

photo of woman leaning on brown table
photo of woman leaning on brown table
pile of printing papers
pile of printing papers