Despite the wage deal struck last week, a pay structure that recognises and rewards the performances of outstanding individuals is still needed.

The AEU says teaching is a collaborative activity. It says teaching depends on teamwork. These are lies, deft ways of ensuring that everyone is paid the same. No matter that some people on the "team" work harder and carry others who are lazy or incompetent but earn not one cent more for doing so.

Is that fair? Hardly – but the AEU says it is.

School principals often say performance pay can cause real issues in a staffroom. Good. If a teacher is known to be outstanding, why is she or he shackled to an incremental increase linked to years served? Performance pay is so detested by the AEU that Napthine had to take it off the table to solve the recent long-running pay dispute in Victorian state schools. But performance pay will not go away. Nor should it. Unless it is brought in, hard-working teachers, known to be dedicated, competent and skilled, are being discriminated against. The AEU is silent on what amounts to an unfair work practice – read it as prejudice against excellence.

This may be about to change. The Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission has recommended that school principals be given the power to hire and fire their own staff and pay them what they think they are worth. Should this recommendation be accepted by Napthine, he will have done more to solve the ills of Victorian education that have dogged it for decades.

The VCEC suggestion that bad teachers, paid exactly the same as excellent teachers, may be damaging children's learning is not hard to believe. Parents and students know who works harder than others. Principals, if they are honest, know too. Some teachers are bludgers; colleagues know and are resentful that they draw the same pay.

The idea of a graded scale, advocated by the VCEC, makes palpable sense. Teachers who are able to demonstrate that they are good should be accelerated over the pay walls and be given a salary concomitant with their competence.

What is perhaps not well known is that the Napthine government has been trialling merit-based pay in targeted state schools. The Rewarding Teacher Excellence program gives the top 30 per cent of teachers in participating schools rises in their salary. It is performance pay. Moreover, the sense of this was expressed by Ian Sloane, principal of Mitcham Primary School, who said: "At the moment, you're basically rewarding teachers on the length of time they've been a teacher, not quality."

Predictably, Victorian AEU president Meredith Peace has called the process "incredibly secretive".

I suspect the excellent teachers with bulging pay packets are no longer prepared to take one for the team.

Performance pay has to be seen as fair and proper for excellent teachers.

The ACT has leapfrogged the thorny bush of performance pay and appointed a group of government school teachers earning $100,000. ACT Education Minister Joy Burch says the new appointments, 10 as a start, will have the new classification of executive teachers. Apart from teaching, they will also act as coaches and mentors to teachers. There is no reason why Victoria could not emulate this with state school teachers and introduce performance pay by promotion. It is hard to imagine the AEU would blackball such teachers who have broken ranks for dollars.

The holding back of teachers in this state rests with the AEU insisting on one size fits all with pay and the furphy of teaching being a collaborative exercise, making it hard to select better performers for fear of destabilising the team.

Teaching cannot call itself a profession while its pay rates are stymied by little more than union pressure.

Victorian state school teachers deserve to be paid what they are worth, not what the AEU determines.

Christopher Bantick is a senior literature teacher in a Melbourne boys' Anglican grammar school.