The School Management Committee

Who does a village school belong to? Most schools stand on land given by the community. Local people often helped to build them, with their labour or with donations. The children who study there are the community's own sons and daughters. For these reasons a school is treated as the property of the community.

If the community owns the school, the community must also look after it. So that parents and local people have a voice in how the school is run, every school has a School Management Committee. This committee plays an important part in taking care of the school and managing it.

The committee is made up of people from the community who are connected with the school and want it to do well. Its members are:

• people chosen by the parents
• the chairperson or a member of the ward in which the school stands
• local intellectuals, that is, educated and thoughtful people of the area
• well-wishers of education, people who care about learning
• people who have given special help to the school

One person is chosen from among these members to be the chairperson, who leads the committee and runs its meetings. The head teacher of the school acts as the member secretary. The head teacher is in the school every day, so it is the head teacher who carries the committee's decisions into the school and keeps the committee informed about how the school is doing.

Whether a school runs well depends a great deal on its Management Committee. The committee is responsible for keeping the school's physical property safe and for putting to use the resources the school receives. Its main duties are:

• protecting the school's physical property, such as its land, buildings and furniture
• making proper use of the resources received for running the school
• approving the school's annual budget
• keeping a clean and fair learning environment in the school
• receiving a teacher posted to the school, recording their joining and putting them to work
• keeping the school's physical, academic and financial records up to date
• getting the school's accounts audited every year

Picture these duties in the life of a real school. At the start of the year the school plans how much money it will spend and on what. That plan, the budget, cannot be used until a meeting of the committee approves it. When a new teacher is posted to the school, the committee records their joining and sets them to work. Records of how many rooms the school has, how many pupils study there and how much was earned and spent are always kept up to date. At the end of the year an independent expert checks whether the accounts are correct. This check is called an audit.

A child's learning cannot be improved by teachers alone, nor by parents alone. Children learn well when both work together. The Teacher-Parent Association exists in a school to bring them together.

The association can play these important roles for a school:

• improving the quality of education in the school
• building friendly relations between the school, its parents and members of the community
• collecting material and financial help for the school when it is needed

A teacher is not only someone who teaches at the school. A teacher is also a member of the local community. The association therefore narrows the gap between the school and the people around it. Once it is formed, it becomes much easier to involve the intellectuals, education workers, social workers, community leaders and respected people living nearby in the school's activities. A community leader may attend the annual function, someone may donate books to the library, and others may give their labour to level a playground. In this way the leaders of the community come forward, as volunteers, to help improve the school.

In our education system every community school has a Teacher-Parent Association. All the teachers and all the parents of the school are its members. An association with hundreds of members cannot meet to do its everyday work, so the parents' general meeting forms an executive committee to act for it.

This executive committee has at most eleven members. It includes the committee's chairperson, the head teacher, teachers and parents, so both sides, teachers and parents, have a voice in it.

The executive committee's main tasks are:

• helping to keep up the quality of the school's teachers
• keeping watch over the fees the school has fixed and giving suggestions about them
• holding discussions between teachers and parents about the school's learning activities

An interaction is a meeting where both sides sit face to face and exchange ideas. After exam results come out, for example, the association may call a meeting of teachers and parents. Teachers explain in which subjects the pupils seem weak, parents describe how much time children get for study at home and what difficulties they face, and together they look for ways to improve. In the same way, if the school plans to raise its fees, the association checks whether the rise is fair and gives its suggestions.

Both bodies link the community to the school, but they are made up differently and do different main jobs:

The School Management Committee and the Teacher-Parent Association work inside a single school. Thousands of schools across the country are guided by bodies at higher levels. At the national level, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology makes the policies, plans, laws and standards for managing, supervising, monitoring and regulating the community and institutional schools in every village and community. Within the Acts, laws and policies made at the federal level, the provinces and local governments make and carry out their own laws, rules, policies, plans and procedures for their own areas.

Under the Ministry there are several departmental bodies in the education sector. They carry out national policies and rules, run the work each is responsible for, and give directions to the offices below them. They are:

• the Centre for Education and Human Resource Development
• the National Examinations Board
• the Curriculum Development Centre
• the Education Review Office, which checks the quality of education

At the provincial level, education is the work of the province's Ministry of Social Development, which prepares the policy for educational development within its province. Each of the seven provinces has an Education Development Directorate to carry out the education Acts, policies and rules. For training teachers and building their skills, each province has an Educational Training Centre.

Every district has an Education Development and Coordination Unit, which works under the federal centre. Every rural municipality and municipality has set up its own education office. This office runs and manages the schools within its rural municipality or municipality, so it is the government office that works most closely with your own school.