Teachers' registers not frequently updated
Tsaone Basimanebotlhe | Tuesday February 28, 2023 06:00
“In some cases, teachers who had been transferred out still appeared in the original schools register while the replacement teacher’s name did not appear in the register despite their resumption of duty at the new school. In response management indicated that it has to be noted that before November 2021, there was an acute shortage of qualified Primary School teachers as they were exhausted in the market,” the report reveals.
According to the report, this resulted in many vacant posts at primary schools which went unfilled for a very long time. It, however, notes that to address this, the Ministry of Education and Skills Development and the establishment registers took a deliberate decision to engage graduates with diplomas in Secondary Education and certain degree disciplines permanently at primary schools.
Moreover, the report stated that the ministry acknowledges that there has been a gap in terms of updating the establishment registers as required. It states in some cases the region had manually done the transfers but did not update in the Oracle system. “This is an anomaly and the region is currently working on updating the registers. Vacancy reports are updated regularly.
Vacancy occurrences take place frequently, almost daily as they are caused by promotions, transfers, re-designations, resignations, and others.” The report observed that there is a need to bring about improvements in the maintenance of establishment registers and these need to be matched with the Oracle system to prevent ‘ghost’ employees. On issues of textbooks that were not delivered, the report states books valued at P893,028.36 were fully paid for but had not been delivered to schools by some publishers.
However, it says the delivery spreadsheet and payment vouchers demonstrated that the books had been paid for and allocation made for distribution to various schools.
On that note, the ministry acknowledged that there were gaps in the process of procuring secondary schools in the sense that the procurement officers at the schools received the textbooks and signed the delivery notes. However, the payment was made at the regional office and as such the procurement officer at the regional office generated a Goods Receipt Note to accompany the invoice for payment.
Again, on the issue of temporary teachers, during the time of the audit, it was observed that there was no linkage between the Human Resources unit, accounts administration unit, and the sub-region paying offices to enable verification of information relating to temporary teachers. It further reveals that some temporary teachers' personal files did not include all vital information such as acceptance letters, assumption of duty letters, re-direction letters, effective transfer dates, and confirmations among others.
“This may be due to a lack of thorough internal checks when processing temporary teacher’s recruitment information. The ministry acknowledges that there have been some irregularities in some of the records that need to be kept for Temporary Teachers. The prevailing practice is that Temporary Teachers’ appointment letters do not have a provision for acceptance of offer,” the report says.
Still on the matter, it further states that this is an irregularity that has since been addressed by amending the letter to include the acceptance of the offer since the beginning of the financial year 2022–2023.
It says the assumption of duty letters are given to sub-regions by the schools to process payments for temporary teachers and they are, therefore, kept at sub-regions. In that regard, the regional office conceded that there may be some files not appropriately labelled, purely due to human error.