THE Teaching Service Division within the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development and Education Providers have held a three day workshop in Honiara. The workshop was held at St Barnabas Cathedral hall from 16th-18th December 2024. More than 40 education providers representing Government, Provincial, and non-government or church/faith based and private education providers attended the workshop.
The purpose of the workshop was to verify and collect missing employment data on individual teachers serving under each education provider.
Teacher employment data is required to implement the new teacher classification and salary structure that the Ministry is obliged to implement in the first quarter of 2025.
Additionally, accurate individual teachers data is vital in the implementation of the new teacher classification and salary structure so that correct payments of fortnightly wages can be made to the teachers serving under the education providers.
The Ministry of Education does have employment data of individual teachers in its Education Management Information System, but these are currently being verified and crossed-checked with the Aurion data or payroll system that the Ministry of Public Service and Ministry of Finance and Treasury use. The intent is to have the same data/information about individual teachers in both the Education Management Information System and the Aurion payroll data/information system.
Data cleaning of individual teachers serving in the ECE, primary and secondary schools is vitally important for analyses, consistency, accuracy and most importantly so that they are complete and used to inform key decision making and to avoid anomalies that may be costly.
One of the tasks the Education Providers did during the workshop was to identify the vacant teaching positions that exist in their schools and to fill them. The Teaching Service Division advised the Education Providers to identify teachers who may be posted to other schools within their education providers or to another education provider. In the past years, teachers who were posted to another school under a different education provider were not recorded nor were they reported to the Teaching Service Division and so this caused problems with the payroll. Few teachers who voluntarily left the teaching workforce were not recorded nor reported and continued to receive their salaries much to the dismay of the ministry. The Ministry is strategically embarking on a new approach using the employment data of individual teachers and by working very closely with education providers to stamp out any ghost teacher to avoid wastage of money.
The workshop also provided an opportunity to education providers to conduct their teacher data audit and to negotiate and share workforce in terms of teachers postings with their colleagues from other education providers.
The Teaching Service Division, in an effort to reconcile teachers’ lists with the data held within the MEHRD has conducted a major Teacher Data Reconciliation Exercise since August 26th, 2024 by contacting the school leaders.
Currently, a total of 12,200 teachers are teaching across 1,414 registered ece centres and schools in the country.
Meanwhile, education providers have expressed their deep appreciation to MEHRD through the Teaching Service Division for providing an avenue where they can come together to share, discuss, negotiate and identify positions available for teachers.
