Kerala govt. amends controversial order on HSS Principals

The General Education department has amended a controversial order issued a few days ago that required higher secondary Principals to do the job of clerks.

Minister for General Education V. Sivankutty on Monday said in a social media post that directions had been given to amend the order in the wake of objections from teachers and Principals to certain portions of the order.

The order said that there were no jobs in higher secondary that required a full-time clerk. It was to do these jobs that the teaching hours of Principals had been reduced to eight periods a week. Moreover, higher secondary teachers did not have more than two hours of teaching a day on an average. Therefore, the charge of school library could be given to a teacher, the order said.

Reason for the order

It had been issued while implementing an order of the High Court in connection with a petition filed by the manager of Valayanchirangara higher secondary school in Ernakulam seeking sanction of posts of clerk, librarian, and full-time menial employee.

Higher secondary teachers and Principals pointed out the number of periods a teacher had to teach in a week, besides other responsibilities such as continuous assessment, lab activities and related work, exam work, higher secondary admissions, UDISE data collection, scholarship-related work, and so on.

They also pointed out that they had to work even after school hours to complete their responsibilities. Owing to this, they were not getting enough time to connect with students and engage them in extra-curricular and personality development activities. Even as high school head teachers were appointed as school vice-principals by the government ahead of school unification, it did not deploy high school clerks, peons and menial staff to perform higher secondary office work, they pointed out.

The government on Monday issued an amended order pointing out that since there was not enough work in higher secondary to warrant appointment of a full-time clerk in all schools, it was the Principal and teachers with less burden who were currently sharing the work.

‘Financial commitment’

It further said that since the government already had a huge financial commitment in the higher secondary section, sanctioning posts other than the most urgent to any school would create a precedent, creating even more financial burden for the government.

However, teachers have again taken exception to the suggestion that higher secondary was creating a huge financial commitment for the government. The order made it sound as if higher secondary was not part of public education, the Higher Secondary School Teachers’ Association said. It asked which study formed the basis of this conclusion by the government, and pointed out that public education could not be seen from the lens of profit and loss.