Is bullying in the eye of the beholder? Make sure performance management doesn’t go too far

The headteacher calls a young teacher into his office to discuss her performance. There have been complaints from parents, other members of her department think she’s not pulling her weight, and pupil results are not as good as they should be.

Half an hour later, the teacher comes out of the office. She knows where she’s going wrong and is determined to put it right, confident of her head’s support. Or, she comes out distraught, her confidence shattered; she feels she is being bullied.

The balance between performance management and bullying can be a tricky one for heads. Do nothing and you risk alienating parents, creating resentment among staff who feel they are carrying a colleague, and damaging children’s education. Take action and you could demoralise a teacher, spread ill-feeling and lay yourself open to a grievance procedure.

The danger areas for heads fall into two categories: formal performance management, and informal day-to-day contact.

In the first category, the new regime for schools, introduced last September, should reduce some of the risk, says Richard Haigh, head of Coombeshead College in Newton Abbot, Devon.

A key part of the framework gives the responsibility for monitoring and evaluating teachers to their line manager rather than leaving it with the head.
In Richard’s school, with 100 teachers, this means no line manager has more than four people to monitor. “Immediately the danger of victimisation is reduced, because it is not all in the hands of one person,” he says.

Setting out criteria clearly at the beginning of the process, with regular meetings and opportunities to appeal, reduces the likelihood of heads being accused of acting unfairly.

However, the new framework doesn’t remove the risk altogether. Bullying is, in the end, a matter of perception. And there are some teachers who will use an accusation of bullying as a defence mechanism.

“Schools use performance management to be challenging, but some people don’t want to be challenged,” says Edward Gildea, a former secondary head and consultant who runs courses on managing challenging personnel for the Association of School and College Leaders. “The way they make themselves prickly is to go off with stress or claim they are being bullied.”

Although there is no clear division between performance management and bullying, there are things heads can do to make themselves less likely to be accused of bullying. One is to use performance management as a developmental tool rather than a judgemental one. This means ensuring feedback has an element of coaching, and is constructive and positive. Simple techniques such as replacing “but” with “and” can make a surprising difference.

Read more in this week's TES Magazine, out Friday May 16