Profile of VET organisation

Name of organization: Higher Vocational School, Secondary School, Centre of Professional Training, Sezimovo Ústí, Budějovická 421

Country: Czech Republic

e-mail[email protected]

 

Type of VET institute: Upper Secondary vocational education and training

Good practice title

School effective management tools

Baseline / problem

One of most significant problems of the school is to safeguard efficient communication among teachers, non-educational staff and school management team members. It is due to the teacher´s work system as teachers mostly meet only a narrow group of colleagues and pupils. The time schedule does not allow for all teachers to meet quite often as they have some other out-of-school activities.

What takes place at school are not just learning activities as teachers and other employees are involved in the implementation of projects, they develop educational programmes, prepare out-of-school events etc. Assignment of tasks, their continuous checking, evaluation of the performance of educational staffs and other employees is quite difficult given their number. Another problem are the working hours of teachers who usually spend only the direct teaching time at school and perform the rest of their duties at home. However, the presence of teachers at school is inevitable to meet some tasks as they are associated with team work.

This is why we had prepared, set forth and implemented rules that became after some time a standard habit of school employees and brought positive results in a certain time frame.

Good practice: (Measures, instruments, criteria, indicators)

We have introduced regular weekly creative meetings out of the standard teaching time, a term that proved to be optimal is Tuesday from 7:15 to 7:50 a.m. when employees are not tired, yet, and, vice-versa, Monday, an often stressful day, is over.

These meetings are called conferences and they have the nature of conferences, indeed. They are an opportunity for the presentation of the work individual teachers or school departments, information on school novelties, sharing experience and reports from business trips. Such presentations have to be brief, constructive with electronic support. The school management presents current information between individual presentations. Such information refers to the school management, anticipated events and ongoing tasks to be performed by the school and its departments. Each conference includes a time reserved for discussion. Minutes of each conference are written including the attendance list. Attendance used to be compulsory at the very beginning, but it has changed to voluntary as teachers see their presence as inevitable to get necessary information.

Another important school management tool is the duty of each department or section to prepare so called working plan at the beginning of the school year as a set of tasks of the given department based on the vision and long-term strategy of the school. It is determined by five definitions and its further developed into motivation tasks for individual departments. The working plan of individual departments is then published as a set of tasks for the entire school together with specifies objectives, vision and long-term strategy. The school management requires individual organisational departments of the school to distribute and specify tasks to individual workers. This plan is used at the end of the year as a basis for the evaluation of the fulfilment of task and performance of individual school employees.

The third tool of the management and motivation of employees is the evaluation of employees including so called above-tariff salary component. It includes a system of measures published in the form of a directive that describes the way of remuneration of each employee for activities that are beyond the standard framework of working duties. These are defined as services necessary for the school, fulfilment of tasks exceeding the defined job description, working hours and fulfilment of extraordinary tasks resulting from school current needs.

The personal remuneration component is defined, further specified and evaluated twice a year – at the beginning of the school year and prior to the end of the school year. A school management team member invites an employee to an evaluation interview in order to evaluate his/her work by the date and specify tasks for the next period. All the above is set forth in so called partnership agreement that includes minutes of the interview and enumeration of extraordinary bonuses and specification of individual items of the personal surcharge to the salary. The interview is an opportunity for both parties to present their opinions.

All educational staffs are involved in the implementation process and if necessary, in particular when presenting tasks, non-educational staff take part. In case of the creative conference, the implementation evaluation criteria include attendance, frequency of contribution and level of involvement in the discussion. In case of the fulfilment of the directive for the evaluation and plan, it is the entered into partnership agreement.

An indirect contribution of these three measures was termination of employment contract by three school employees for whom the evaluation and motivation system was not acceptable (they cannot accept their evaluation). All the way round, the system contributed to the stabilisation of labour.

This practice has been successfully implemented by the school, it works and its results are manifested in the long-term school performance. These results are an output of consistent human resource management work.

For more information go to school web site at www.copsu.cz.

Problems and constraints encountered and solutions found:

Before the implementation of above measures (directives, working plan and creative conference), we faced lack of willingness of employees to do work exceeding the set forth job description and in order to be able to fulfil set tasks, we had to redefine many activities as a duty set forth in directives At the time being, we abandon this practice as we have found out that such activities have become routine.

Good Practice Category