Address by H.E. Im Sethy,
Secretary of State, MoEYS
It gives me a great pleasure to address this education Round Table. At the outset, I would like to emphasise that effective co-operation between MoEYS and the Council for Administrative Reform (CAR) is critical to implement our education staffing reforms. I am continually encouraged by the shared understanding between key ministries within Government of the unique circumstances facing the MoEYS.
The education service faces particular challenges due to the size and diversity of its personnel. In addition, the education work force is scattered nation-wide with significant variation in the situations in which education services are delivered. For example, we have a broad range of qualifications and experience amongst our staff.
We also have large and small schools in remote areas, reintegrated areas and ethnic minority areas. We have institutions offering a wide variety of different curricula requiring different skills from our personnel. All these features make it difficult to generalize about the way forward in improving education service productivity. In this context, I would like to highlight the main policies and strategic directions for administrative reform in education.
In broad terms, the long-term policy goal of this program is to transform the education service into an efficient and motivated work force. An associated long-term objective of the Ministry is to eliminate the need for informal payments to teachers, through a significant increase in their official remuneration. The Ministry's intention is to reduce costs to parents that are currently a major obstacle to equitable access to basic education.
The Ministry is aware that strict limits are likely to apply on the overall education staff pay rise in the medium term. For this reason, the program strategy will be to raise the official pay for selected groups of school staff. I would like to emphasizes that this will need to be done against identifiable efficiency and productivity benefits for the education sector.
The Ministry recognises that the pace at which salary reform can take place, will depend on how efficiently education service staff are used. Therefore, another medium-term objective is to contribute to the overall efficiency in the use of education resources, through improving the deployment of posts across the different categories of personnel employed in the sector. The Ministry is determined to implement strict deployment and re-deployment measures. The target is that there will be less than 15 per cent of the total education work force employed in non-teaching positions.
A key administrative reform objective will be to ensure that deploying staff to classroom positions is a growing priority. Our target is that primary and secondary teachers will represent at least 82 per cent of the total personnel employed in the sector by 2005. The strategy for achieving this will be to increase pupil/teacher ratios at all levels, alongside measures to re-deploy qualified non-teaching staff back to the classroom.
Another objective is to use administrative reform to improve the quality of education in under-served areas. The strategy will be to put in place a number of measures, including both incentives and new recruitment policies, that ensure remote and difficult schools have qualified staff at their disposal.
The Ministry is determined to improve the quality of the education service as quickly as possible. An immediate measure will be to replace under-qualified contract staff by better-qualified young graduates coming out of the training colleges. Wherever possible, the Ministry will ensure that all new graduates coming out of the TTCs are employed. The proposed new incentive programs would guarantee that many more newly trained teachers are prepared to start their career in more difficult schools.
I very much endorse the view that efforts to raise education staff salaries, needs to guarantee better performance and attendance. Therefore, a key strategy will be the introduction of minimum standards for staff performance and workloads. This will be linked to associated schemes of performance appraisal for selected teaching and non-teaching staff groups.
The Ministry recognises that effective implementation of the program will necessitate a massive uplift in personnel management capacities at all levels. A key strategy will be to strengthen personnel planning and management systems at all levels. This will require the creation of a cadre of better skilled personnel managers. You will note that this kind of capacity building is accorded very high priority within our ESSP proposals.
I would now like to highlight what early actions the Ministry will take to implement these administrative reform policies and strategies. Firstly, within the next few months, we intend to finalise a set of rigorous staff planning norms and deployment guidelines. Secondly, the Ministry will move quickly on the development of minimum staff performance and workload standards and of performance appraisal systems.
The Ministry also sees the administrative reform program as a key component of broader decentralisation. For example, we intend to move quickly on preparation of guidelines for provincial education department planning. This will include formulation and implementation of detailed annual action plans for personnel deployment and re-deployment. This will be linked to preparation of provincial budget allocations and of minimum efficiency targets for each province.
The Ministry is aware that personnel costs represent a large part of the resources available to education. At the same time, effective deployment and performance of staff is critical to implementation of our broader access and quality improvement policies. It is therefore very important that the progress and impact of the proposed administrative reform is monitored regularly and effectively.
For this reason, the Ministry attaches very high priority to strengthening the capacity of the Directorate General for Administration, Finance and Planning to undertake these monitoring duties. We will need to monitor that staff deployment guidelines are being followed. We will need to audit the financial implications of staff deployment in each province.
We will need to ensure that teachers and managers are performing better in classrooms and offices. I would therefore ask the international community to assist quickly with support for administrative reform program monitoring.
Finally, I wish to assure you all that the Ministry is firmly committed to fair and transparent administrative reform for education. As you will all be aware, these issues need to be dealt with patiently and sensitively. Nevertheless, I have every confidence that, with support from all stakeholders, we can use administrative reform to guarantee a better education for Cambodia's children.