Teachers are being demotivated by “crackers” performance targets that are impossible to meet, a conference has heard.

It comes after TES revealed that some primary school teachers were being denied pay rises on the basis of ‘unreliable’ 2016 Sats results.

John Girdley, a member of the NASUWT union’s national executive, told conference delegates about one teacher who was told “to get 18 pupils to grade A or better” – despite only having 13 pupils in his class.

Describing the target as “crackers”, he said that when the teacher pointed this out to management, he was told: “It doesn’t matter, you’ve got to do it.”

He said another teacher was given a target of increasing his school’s year 7 intake from 110 to 130, and asked “how was that in his control?”

He said other examples of unfair targets included a head of department being held accountable for the results of others, and a teacher being told to get all pupils to A*.

Mr Girdley cited the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions document which states: “Pay decisions must be clearly attributable to the performance of the teacher in question.”

He told the conference: “Having impossible targets drives workload. It’s utterly counterproductive. It demotivates teachers.

“We have the tools already to fight this abuse. We will escalate to industrial action whenever the members ask us. We will win, because we will see it out to the end.”

The conference passed a motion saying it was “deeply alarmed by the widespread abuse of pupil performance data in the management of teachers”.

It called for the NASUWT national executive to escalate industrial action “to defend members from inappropriate management practices”.

Mark Parsons, who seconded the motion, told delegates: “Achievements of pupils are highly individual and subject to a number of influencing factors most of which are not in the direct control of the teacher.

“But performance management is about enhancing and developing the performance of teachers. Reducing this to a simplistic numerical figure is wholly inappropriate.”