This shows how little the government comprehends the organic, human side of teaching. It also demonstrates how politicians fail to understand what goes on in schools. For a start, schools are complex environments. They are full of people. They aren't mines. This might be seen to be stating the bleeding obvious but you can't measure schools and the people in them in the same way you measure iron ore. The human variable affects everything that happens in a school. Good teaching is impossible to measure. Examination results might be easy to measure. They tell us that students at well-resourced schools will do better in examinations than students at poorly resourced schools. Isn't that incredible? Examination results will also suggest that students from comfortable middle-class backgrounds will get better marks than students from less privileged backgrounds. Another earth shattering fact. Then there are the NAPLAN tests which are held up as an example of educational measurement. They prove that some students in year 3 can sit still long enough to answer a few multiple choice questions. I spent many years in classrooms across the country. In my last few years I was told that we were ''value adding'' to the students. I nearly fell off my chair. Value adding?' I thought we were teaching them. How do you measure the teacher who lifts a student's self-esteem higher than their mathematics mark? If a student does well in a NAPLAN test does that mean they have been taught well or coached well?

Good teachers spend most of their time trying to get students with little or no self-esteem to believe in themselves. This might be in a classroom, on a sporting field or in an artistic endeavour. I have seen a boy who had poor literacy skills, English was his second language after all, soar when the play he wrote was performed for his peers. That boy was literally bouncing around the playground after his play's performance because his peers had laughed at his words. That was as good an educational "outcome" as you could imagine. It was also good teaching, although I didn't do any more than encourage him. It was also impossible to measure. The idea of rewarding good teaching implies there is a lot of bad teaching. Let's put that one to bed straight away. There isn't lots of bad teaching. There are lots of stressed teachers working in difficult conditions who are trying desperately to get the best results they can for their charges. One laughable statistic quoted by the government is that "teaching time" has fallen from 18 hours a week to 16.3 hours a week. What is "teaching time"? Is that time in front of a classroom? Does it account for counselling students in the playground or playing footy with them at lunchtime? Every minute a teacher spends in school is "teaching time". And quite a lot of minutes outside school hours. Teachers have adapted to the greatest technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution without anyone noticing. They are constantly changing the way they relate to their students. They have to speak the same language as students or they fall behind and stop relating to them at all. Have they been rewarded for this? Have they been saluted by society at large for being able to move with the incredibly fast-moving times? No. They have been put under the pump.

Teachers are incredibly flexible. Try teaching 25 testosterone-fuelled 15-year-olds for a lesson, then march into a roomful of slightly confused 13-year-olds for 40 minutes and then on to class of 17 and 18-year-olds who are ''over it''. You need to be an emotional juggler, juggling the needs of a whole range of students often from a range of backgrounds. I taught kids who topped the state. I was congratulated for the achievement. I used to point out that Mickey Mouse could have taught those kids to top the state. What Mickey would have struggled with was getting kids on the bottom of the pile to believe in themselves and finish in the middle of the pile. This is where good teaching happens and it is impossible to measure. The idea that, having magically measured who was doing "good teaching", you would then reward them over and above their colleagues beggars belief.

It also suggests that whoever dreamt this up has never set foot inside a staffroom. Instead of grabbing at quick-fix solutions to complex problems, it is time politicians made an effort to find out exactly what goes on in schools rather than trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Ned Manning is a teacher with more than 40 years' experience, and author of Playground Duty. Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU

