Teachers’ woes: Stopgap solutions hurting permanent staff

Teachers say seniority lists not being updated, new staff being ‘improperly’ inducted.

RAWALPINDI:

Though education is often called a top state priority, teachers’ salaries have never been treated as part of the equation.

From recruitment and training to promotion policies and practices, the existing system seems designed to be incapable of attracting the cream-of-the-crop or even to hone the skills of those who are hired through skill development opportunities.

The situation is so bad that the principal of a government college in Rawalpindi told The Express Tribune on the condition of anonymity that except for a handful of exceptions, most of the candidates join education department due to lack of better job opportunities rather than as a first choice.

He added that this is also a reason for why many teachers are unmotivated --- they were never interested in doing the job I the first place.

Other problem areas are the promotion structure and procedure. One hard but largely unacknowledged fact is that a teacher will usually have to wait for anywhere between 18 and 20 years of service to get their first promotion. The principal offered himself as an example. He got his first promotion after 23 years of service and had to wait another 10 months for his posting orders to be issued.

“Such a dismal promotion structure even discourages those who join the department purely out of love for teaching,” he said.

“I love teaching, but one can lose the drive in such a stagnant environment. I know many colleagues who have served for over ten years but have not even been allotted their seniority numbers because the department has not updated the seniority lists, he said.

Regarding promotions, he said the main reason for extraordinary delays is irregular recruitment.

He said almost half of the posts for teachers in Rawalpindi division are vacant. He added that the situation is worst in schools located in the peripheries. The government has decided to hire intern teachers to fill vacant posts in boys and girls colleges across the province as a stopgap arrangement instead of appointing permanent staff, which is a need of the hour, he added.

He said ad hoc arrangements are also creating hurdles in career progression for permanent employees.

What is the purpose of the Punjab Public Service Commission (PPSC) if they are not able to appoint permanent staff through proper procedures, he said.

He revealed that there is another interesting element concealed in the ad hoc arrangements. “Money is doled out by the education department against permanent seats including vacant ones, but the interns are paid less than permanent staff and the rest of the money is silently diverted by the government to other projects,” he said.

The education department should abandon all such ad hoc appointments as these have serious implications for promotions of teachers and quality of education, he said.

College teachers should be given a similar time scale and seniority list needs to be made and updated regularly, he said. Moreover, certain unfair practices need to be abandoned, he said, explaining that officially, the presentation and preparation of promotion cases is the duty of administrative offices, but in practice, the whole burden is shifted to other persons who end up getting blamed for what are really the administrative offices’ failures.

He said, for instance, that according to Departmental Promotion Committee (DPC) rules, recommendations for promotion remain valid for one year, which implies that if the department fails to issue posting orders within this time frame, the recommended teacher will suffer.

An education department official, who requested not to be named, told The Express Tribune that the there is a need to reform the entire system including college administration but regretted that education is still not treated as a top priority. “There is a need to update seniority lists in time but it is never done. Stop gap arrangements will not help improve the system,” he remarked.

He added that PPSC is actually responsible for the situation because it is the responsibility of the department to recruit permanent staff.

Rawalpindi Division Colleges Director Professor Humayun Iqbal told The Express Tribune that the appointment of CTIs would not impact the promotion of permanent staff because it was a temporary arrangement. He said that the department has decided to induct these interns in order to facilitate students because there was shortage of lecturers.

He added that PPSC is not only supervising education but many other departments, hence it needs time to address the issues such as better service structure and appointment of permanent staff. He added, however, that efforts are being made to recruit permanent staff in place of interns and during recruitment, the interns would be given preference.

Almost 2,000 promotions are being processed, he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 10^th, 2014.