Facing backlash from a section of the teaching community, job aspirants, and college managements, the State government is reviewing its order on modifying workload norms for ‘creating teaching posts in aided arts and science colleges’.
The move has come against the backdrop of an intervention by the CPI(M) State leadership to broker peace in the issue that apparently found two of its feeder organisations adopting conflicting perspectives.
File recalled
The Finance Department is learnt to have recalled the file pertaining to the Government Order along with representations that have been made by various fora to the Higher Education Department.
Major concerns
Besides increasing the workload of teachers in aided colleges from 9 hours to 16 hours per week as a criterion to sanction new posts, the Higher Education Department removed the weightage that considered each teaching hour of postgraduate (PG) classes as equivalent to one-and-a-half hours while calculating workload for staff fixation. Taking exception to the move, college teachers including the members of CPI(M)-affiliate All Kerala Private College Teachers’ Association had maintained that it would have far-reaching consequences.
Under the existing circumstances, the reform would lead to staff strength in PG departments decreasing from five to three, they claimed, adding the provision that posts created on the basis of “workload less than 16 hours will vanish on the retirement/resignation/relieving of the teacher” could lead to a loss of roughly over 2,000 periods over a certain period of time.
Social media campaign
An aggressive social media campaign appears to have resonated among job aspirants who fear the move could lead to a virtual appointment freeze to teaching posts for at least 10 years.
While the Finance Department had insisted the order be implemented to realise its promise of creating 1,000 teaching posts in the aided sector, critics claimed that they were meant to address the inadequacy of posts for those courses that had been created by the previous United Democratic Front (UDF) government in 2013 and not compensate for the expected loss of seats caused by modifying workload norms.
Government sources said the reform was in continuance of the ongoing scrutiny of post creation in the aided sector that previously saw the dispensation flagging violations of the Pupil-Teacher Ratio, prescribed in the Right to Education Act, in appointments in aided schools.