Prime
Appoint substantive headteachers in all secondary schools
Author: Patrick Kaboyo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Mr Patrick Kaboyo says: Keeping officers in acting capacity undermines efficiency...
To avoid drama in our schools, all head teachers and their deputies must be substantively appointed. Men and women of substance should not be made to act forever. Many have looked on with no option but to continue acting even when the six months as stipulated in their appointment documents, long elapsed. While this trend of affairs dates two decades ago, it should be a concern for the appointing authority to put a stop to such a bad practice.
Keeping men and women of substance in caretaker and acting positions undermines the principle of efficiency and effective management and administration of institutions. To cure the vice, once and for all, the Education Service Commission should be tasked to clean up all appointments to accelerate and facilitate the appointment of all caretaker and acting heads.
Subsequently, if you have bothered to find out whether your son’s or daughter’s head teacher is fully or substantively appointed, you will be shocked. As a parent, you need to be actively involved in the governance and leadership of your child’s school because substantively appointed head teachers are critical in the delivery of key education and sports reforms. They are a tool for the implementation of the 4th Sustainable Development Goal, “Quality Education” as well as the 4th industrial revolution. Because of the need to better our education system in Uganda today, government must know that many of the reforms will be delivered by fully appointed and substantive heads of institutions.
Fully appointed head teachers in any school, act rationally, professionally and are accountable.
They are reliable finance and human resource managers who efficiently and effectively innovate because they are in charge and in control. They are extrinsically and intrinsically easy to motivate to work for they are certain of the safety and security of their tenure including equal pay for work of equal value, pension and gratuity. Government should not frustrate head teachers to leave them in caretaker or acting position beyond the six months stipulated by law.
When a head of institution is appointed in caretaker position, acting or temporarily left in office, subordinates can never get the best out of him or her. Such a state of affairs breeds resentment, burn out, fraud, resignation, incompetence, stress as well as an ‘I don’t care attitude’. Much as the law is clear with appointment, there are quite a number of operational measures schools have continued to employ outside the law to ensure efficient and effective administration of schools.
The first operational measure employed by schools outside the law is the designation of individuals as director of studies (DOS), the other is the segmentation of the deputy head teacher position where schools have assigned individuals positions of deputy head teacher in charge of, academics, welfare, administration and sometimes special duties. In the numerous illegitimate positions in our schools, the deputy head teacher position has lost meaning.
While many, if not, all schools continue to appoint heads of department in form of subject heads, to facilitate smooth running of schools, public service is silent on streamlining such positions. Parents continue to foot the bill for allowances to such positions in all schools. Government must institutionalise structures as well as incentivise them to promote good governance and leadership in schools.
In conclusion, keeping officers in acting capacity in any position beyond legally prescribed time in any institution undermines efficiency and effectiveness of both public and private institutions.
Whereas working without any contract verbal or written is common in many private institutions, government institutions should not be seen to continue offering a bad example to private education institutions.
Mr Kaboyo is a member of the Education Sector Consultative Committee.
