A growing number of schools are scrapping traditional appraisals in favour of continuous feedback cultures. We examine the evidence and what it means for staff development.
There is a quiet but significant movement underway in English schools. After decades of annual appraisal cycles — observations, targets, ratings, performance-related pay decisions — a growing number of school leaders are concluding that the traditional performance management system is not just ineffective but actively counterproductive. And they are doing something about it.
The shift away from annual reviews toward continuous feedback cultures is not, in most cases, a rejection of accountability. It is a recognition that the annual appraisal model — borrowed from corporate management theory of the 1970s — is poorly designed for the complex, relational, professional work of teaching.
The problems with traditional annual appraisal in a school context are well documented. The research on performance management in education consistently identifies several fatal flaws.
Annual reviews provide feedback once a year. Teaching is a craft that improves through frequent, specific, timely feedback on practice. A teacher who delivers a brilliant lesson in September and a struggling lesson in February and receives feedback in May has been denied the responsive coaching that would actually improve their practice. The delay renders the feedback largely irrelevant (Wiliam, 2016).
When appraisal is linked to pay progression — as it has been in maintained schools since 2013 — it changes the nature of the observation interaction. Teachers perform rather than teach. Conversations focus on justification rather than reflection. The psychological safety required for genuine professional learning is undermined by the evaluative stakes of the process.
Teaching is immensely complex. Annual appraisal systems attempt to capture that complexity in a handful of targets, a couple of observation grades and a rating decision. The reduction of a year's professional practice to these data points tells us almost nothing useful about how a teacher is developing or what they need to grow.
The research on effective professional development — including the landmark Cordingley et al. (2015) synthesis — consistently points to the same alternative: frequent, collaborative, peer-supported professional learning embedded in daily practice. Not observation as evaluation, but observation as enquiry. Not targets set by managers, but development priorities identified by teachers themselves. Not annual reviews, but ongoing coaching conversations.
Schools that have moved in this direction — developing what organisational theorists call a continuous feedback culture — report significant improvements in staff wellbeing, professional learning and ultimately student outcomes (Teacher Development Trust, 2024).
In practice, schools transitioning away from traditional appraisal are implementing various combinations of the following:
Moving away from annual appraisal requires school leaders to develop a different kind of leadership capability. Coaching conversations require skills that observation and target-setting do not. Trust-based performance management requires a different relationship with accountability than compliance-based systems. And the cultural shift from summative judgment to ongoing development takes time, consistency and genuine commitment from senior leadership.
At Academica Mentoring we work with school leaders on exactly these challenges — developing the coaching skills, the cultural intelligence and the strategic thinking required to build organisations where professional learning is continuous, collaborative and genuinely transformative.