No more admin tasks for teachers

MANILA, Philippines — Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte on Friday formalized her directive to all school division offices (SDOs) and school heads to unburden public school teachers of administrative tasks.

In her Department Order (DO) 002 series of 2024 dated Jan. 26, Duterte ordered the “immediate removal of administrative tasks of public school teachers” to ensure their welfare and improve their quality of teaching.

“The Department of Education (DepEd) believes that the core of quality basic education is a vibrant and quality teaching workforce. Under the MATATAG Agenda, the department is committed to enhancing the delivery of quality basic education while promoting teacher quality and teacher welfare,” Duterte’s DO stated.

“This DO shall take effect immediately upon its approval, issuance and publication on the DepEd website,” it added.

As of 6 p.m. last Friday, the DO had already been uploaded on the DepEd website.

In a set of guidelines attached to the DO, the agency said the order covers all “DepEd-employed teachers engaged in classroom teaching, on a fuIl-time basis, under permanent, provisional or substitute status in all public elementary and secondary schools.”

The DepEd cited a 2018 Teacher Workload Balance Study, showing that about 50 common ancillary services not related to teaching were being assigned to teachers on top of their regular teaching load, “ultimately affecting teaching quality and teacher well-being.”

Among the administrative tasks identified in the DO were personnel administration, property/physical facilities custodianship, general administrative support, financial management, records management and management of programs not related to teaching such as feeding program, school disaster risk reduction program and other related programs.

The DepEd said these administrative tasks “shall be performed by school heads and non-teaching personnel.”

To augment the non-teaching personnel requirements of schools, the DepEd said SDOs “may cluster deployed non-teaching personnel in accordance with the deployment parameters issued by the Bureau of Human Resource and Organizational Development.”

The DepEd said that SDOs and schools may also “hire personnel under contract of service (COS) or job order (JO), which may be charged either against maintenance and other operating expenses (MOOE) or other alternative sources of funding.”

The agency, however, did not specify up to how many non-teaching personnel that SDOs or the schools may hire.

Nonetheless, it noted that its Office of the Undersecretary for Human Resource and Organizational Development shall soon issue a “strand memorandum” to provide all necessary tools and procedures on the implementation of the new policy.

The DepEd said the strand memorandum shall particularly discuss the “clustering of schools and provision of additional MOOE for the hiring of COS/JO personnel, if necessary.”

Meanwhile, the agency gave SDOs a period not exceeding 60 calendar days to cluster schools without existing or sufficient non-teaching personnel, with each cluster composed of a maximum of three schools.

SDOs were also given up to 60 days to deploy administrative support personnel to perform administrative tasks for the clustered schools, immediately transfer and turn over existing administrative tasks performed by teachers to school heads and non-teaching personnel and hire additional administrative support personnel, if necessary.

In an interview with radio dzRH last Friday, Teachers Dignity Coalition (TDC) chairman Benjo Basas welcomed the DepEd’s new order, saying that his group has been lobbying for the removal of administrative and clerical tasks of teachers for years.