KATHMANDU, MARCH 14
The Constitution of Nepal, 2015 has mandated the local governments (LGs) to manage school education comprising of both basic and secondary education.
As such, there are 753 LGs, out of which 460 are rural municipalities and 293 are municipalities (6 metropolitan cities, 11 sub-metropolitan cities, 276 municipalities) in the federal structure.
The Local Government Operations Act, 2017 has specified 23 functions of the LGs related to basic and secondary education. The broad responsibilities of the LGs range from formulating, implementing, monitoring, evaluating and regulating policies, laws, standards and plans related to early childhood development, basic and secondary education, parental education, non-formal/informal education, open and alternative continuous learning, and community learning to special education.
Above all, one most striking change in the school education sector is that the previous welfare approach to school education has given way to a right-based approach whereby all children are to get free and compulsory education up to grade eight and free education from grade nine to 12 in government schools.
All these provisions and commitments, including Sustainable Development Goal 4, have resulted in a 10-year School Education Sector Plan (2022/023- 2031/032) to steer, guide and coordinate Nepal's school education. The LGs through the Education Sections, led by the under-secretary and officer of the respective municipalities and rural municipalities, implement the school education policy, plan and programme.
Therefore, more than 90 per cent of the federal budget on school education goes to the LGs, where the education officers play a paramount role in translating the school education specific policy, plan and programme into actuality.
However, real life experience reveals that there are challenges associated with human resources management of the LG education officers. One fundamental issue amid many is the degrading morale of education officials pertaining to the prevailing performance appraisal system in the LGs. As such, in most of the cases, junior officials of the administrative cadre of the LGs appraise the performance of the senior education officials.
Any student of management knows that the appraisee must be appraised by the immediate boss, who must be one rank or level above the appraisee.
The concept and practice of the performance appraisal system is also related to the fact that the appraiser should coach, counsel and mentor an appraisee when needed. The performance appraisal is not at all limited to assigning values to the work performance of an appraisee against various performance criteria. Exceptionally in the absence of the upper rank appraiser, an official is apprised by the official of the same rank, but s/he must be a senior to the appraisee. The moot question here is: has this fundamental principle been followed in the case of education officials of the LGs? The answer, in most cases, is no except in the cases where a class one senior executive of the administrative cadre is there as the administrative head like Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC).
The reality is that the civil servants of the education cadre (under-secretary and section officers) are appraised by the civil servants of the same rank, and in most cases by a junior civil servant of the administrative cadre. This obviously leads to humiliated education officers with low morale and motivation. In a worst case, senior education officers are found opting for early retirement to get rid of this humiliation.
The immediate and very short-term solution to this could be to depute or transfer a civil servant of the administrative cadre who is senior to the civil servant of the education cadre. This is a management process but rather a partial solution as no counseling, coaching and mentoring can be expected from a civil servant of a different experience and expertise. With the newly established LGs with the constitutional devolution of authority and power, the education officers quite often need guidance, coaching and other counseling and mentoring services from the senior to strengthen the capacity of the LGs.
The medium-term solution could be to adopt an organic organisational structure. The senior-most official, of either the administrative or education cadre, heads the administrative section as an education cadre and can handle the administrative responsibility, if they have rendered there services as the Chief District Officer and Local Development Officer in the past and even as the secretary of the ministries other than education.
Also during the state restructuring process, a mechanical approach was adopted where by all municipalities were provided with under-secretaries and all rural municipalities with officers to head their respective education sections.
As a result, there are many rural municipalities that look after a greater number of schools than municipalities. The longterm and sustainable solution to this could be to conduct a Management and Organisation (O and M) survey by a competent authority.
This is to install a well balanced organogram of LGs based on the work load of the LGs concerned so that an appropriate position is placed based on the amount of responsibility to be shouldered.
For example, there are municipalities headed by under-secretaries with schools as few as 11 while there are rural municipalities headed by officers with as many as 64 schools. The KMC, headed by an under-secretary, manages more than 600 schools.
There must, therefore, be a balance between responsibility and authority of the education heads to ensure an uninterrupted flow of education services. The O and M survey must also remedy the issue of performance appraisal with the placement of an appropriate management process and positions as a sustainable solution, once and for all.
Thapa is a former Education Secretary
A version of this article appears in the print on March 15, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.
