Livre d'Or

The spines and points thing is a formalized pay structure which is supposed to look like a backbone. There are thick (sort of like vertebrae, I guess) "spines" which represent grade levels; everybody at the same grade starts on the same salary. Then there are "points" which increment your salary within that grade; mostly they're based strictly objective measures like how many years you've been in the post. It's possible, but unusual, for someone who has loads of points to be earning more than a person at the bottom of the next spine up.

The career advancement points are a bit different; they don't determine salary directly, they're just a piece of evidence which is taken into account when deciding who should be promoted, and possibly who isn't doing their job properly. The idea is that someone who does loads of teaching and community service should be able to apply for promotion on that basis, whereas if someone does loads of research and publishes well, then it will be obvious to everyone they have a shot at promotion.

But there is a degree of discretion in it; what I do is go to my sympathetic and enlightened line manager and say, this is what I've been doing this semester, can I have some career recognition points for it please? If my line manager happened to be sexist or otherwise biased, he might well assign fewer points for the types of activities that women often do, such as sitting on thankless committees or providing pastoral support for students. It's somewhat better than those kinds of community service activities being completely invisible when it comes to promotion and tenure decisions, but it's not a perfect solution by any means.