Gender bias?: ‘Primary school teachers denied promotions’

Teachers said the female-dominated category is ignored by administrators

ISLAMABAD: Noreen, a teacher at a model public school, is set to retire next year. She has taught fifth grade for the last 25 years. She says she is leaving with a heavy heart, after serving for so long in “a dead-end job”, where she only got one promotion in the course of her career.

Noreen joined the school in 1992, and has only been promoted once, from BS-16 to BS-17, and even that was because of onetime across-the-board promotions ordered by former prime minister Yousaf Raza Gillani in 2011. In 2015, she was given a time-scale, but she still only receives salary for the next grade, and none of the perks and privileges.

It is disheartening to see people around you being rewarded for their hard work, while female teachers at junior school levels are neither promoted to the next grade, nor is their work valued, she said.

She became a teacher because she really wanted to, but is retiring with a lot of resentment.  “I now advise my students not to opt for this profession, as the working conditions are substandard, the work of female teachers is not valued, and it offers no opportunities to excel”.

There are no proper procedures in place for the promotions of junior-level teachers, while high school teachers are regularly promoted on the basis of a 4-tier promotion formula.

The Federal Directorate of Education (FDE), under which ICT schools and colleges operate, does not maintain records of female teachers working in junior classes, nor up-to-date seniority lists. According to rough estimates from representative bodies of teachers, there are about 550 women working in junior classes at 20 model colleges. Their pay scales vary from BS-16 to 20.

The policies of the directorate are misogynistic and primary school teachers — almost all of whom are female — are always ignored in every initiative, alleged Farzana Akram from Islamabad Model College for Girls I-8/4, who is also a member of the teachers’ association.

“These teachers are overburdened. They take five to seven classes-a-day, and check hundreds of copies and diaries of students every day, but when it comes to their rights, they are always ignored,” she said.

The majority of teachers retire in the same grades as there is no proper promotion formula for them, she said, adding this discrimination has been going on since 1992, when model colleges were shifted under the administrative control of the FDE.

She says that they have met secretaries and knocked on every door but it did not move the concerned officials. They had to personally go to courts and the finance ministry for a period of three years to get the nomenclature changed when it was mistakenly changed during the 2011 up-gradation of teachers. “This was not our job but that of FDE and Capital Administration and Development Division officials,” she said.

“Why aren’t female teachers regularly promoted like the teachers in other cadres, and why do they always have to fight for their due rights”, she asked. “Just because they are women?”

FDE Director General Dr Shehnaz Riaz admitted that things are hotchpotch, but claimed they have been trying to streamline the system.

The four-tier formula is being revised and the new formula will be for the teachers of all cadres, maintained Model Colleges Director Tariq Masood.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 30^th, 2016.