At the last Council and School Meeting the issue of Green Slips was raised. Green slips are used at St Chris to recognise endeavour. They are not a reward for attainment. Some of the older pupils felt that they had ‘outgrown’ this form of recognition and felt that perhaps an e-mail home should be used instead. It was a very helpful discussion in that it set me thinking about the whole notion of rewards/acknowledgement. My thinking was further focussed when it was announced that Executives at Britain's top companies saw their basic salaries leap 10% last year, despite the onset of the worst global recession in decades, in which their companies lost almost a third of their value.

And then there's the encampment outside St Pauls, protesting about the unfairness of the differential between salaries amongst other things.

So, are financial rewards, such as bonuses paid for work done or indeed incentives paid to get work done equitable to rewards systems used in education? How, if at all are rewards in business and education linked? Well, I thought that they were linked by the fundamental truth that if you reward a particular type of behaviour then you get more of it and conversely if you punish a particular type of behaviour then you get less of it. That surely is the basis of financial bonuses and it’s also the basis of our own Green and Pink Slip system (Pink slips are used to record and report concern). But something I watched recently has caused me to pause and has helped to start to crystallise why I feel uneasy and rewards and sanctions. I’ve not concluded my thinking yet but in Morning Talk I shared the animated lecture from the RSA with the School. It’s 10 minutes long and it is very thought provoking:

So, perhaps ‘rewards’ in the traditional sense don’t work; but perhaps in fact there is a difference between a reward and an acknowledgement?

In my experience what children want and need is acknowledgement. To feel that their own Mastery, Purpose and Self-Direction is valued and that in guiding them staff are helping them along that journey.