Hmmm, several points to be addressed here.
Firstly, performance related pay; all teachers are constantly monitored and appraised by senior leaders, if they're no good they are firstly given help and advice on how to improve and then got rid of if they do not improve. Any senior leadership team worth it's salt has the kids' interests at heart first and foremost as a result. So if you aren't performing as a teacher, you are out. Had a teacher in tears on Saturday after giving her the hard word
not nice but necessary. Good ones may get more, but it does, to an extent, depend on the financial circumstances of the school. Where money is tight and (if "Pob" Gove has his way) national pay scales are scrapped and academies are allowed to devise their own individual pay structures this probably won't happen as upto 150 teachers were chasing one job in a school near me recently.
OFSTED is probably a necessary mechanism, but their brief and frames of reference change so often that it is difficult to make objective comparisons between schools using their judgements. We recently were judged to be good with outstanding elements so this isn't sour grapes, just truth as I see it. To say that they are pawns of government is not accurate, but the parameters that they have to work to are predetermined so not totally inaccurate either.
Gove is not effective as an educationalists, having no expertise in the field himself, but knowing what it was like in his day and attempting to move things back there. Parts of the new curriculum seem to have very little relevance to today's world, a requirement for children to know Roman numerals upto 1000 by the end of year6 whilst abandoning their calculators being an example of this. Bastions of the bygone like the odious Daily Mail may uphold his stand but most of today's actual experts in education ( I'm not an expert, just a teacher) shrug their shoulders in despair at his positively harmful ideas about the direction education should be taking.
I , like you, am confused by the children's rights quotes apart from the management ( NB not leadership) of schools now being open to people without any teaching qualifications. This,I feel, will impact on kids' rights to a good education.
Are teachers a special case? No. No one is. Do teachers have a good case in taking action? Probably I think. Anyone who works in excess of twenty years with a contractual obligation to contribute a percentage of their earnings into a pension scheme then have those contributions independently assessed one year as being financially sustainable for the scheme they uphold, then declared inadequate by a government which is financially bankrupt (and morally and socially in receivership too) needing to grab cash from wherever it can has the right to protest I feel.