The Bhutanese Leading the way.
The Managing for Excellence (MaX) Performance Management System was introduced in 2017 for schools.
However, soon after two main issues were brought to the fore by teachers and others working in the schools.
The first was that there was limited clarity and consistency in the assessment of the IWP leading to huge workload on teachers who had to spend a lot of time in compiling and filing the evidence for the evaluation.
The second issue was that the moderation exercise was being carried out in school clusters wherein many schools were clubbed together and moderated as one agency based on the Teacher Resource Center (TRC).
Civil servants, especially in schools that did not have principals at P1 and P2 level, were not able to represent their staff in the Moderation Exercise.
To address the above issue the Ministry of Education formed a Task Force team to study and review the matter at hand.
The Ministry based on the findings of the Taskforce members and recommendation of its Human Resource Committee meeting held on February 19, 2019 submitted their report to RCSC.
After several rounds of meeting between the RCSC and the Ministry of Education, the RCSC in its 159th Commission meeting held March 2019 approved changes in Managing for MaX implementation for civil servants in schools:
To provide clarity and consistency in the assessment of performance, Section B of the Performance Appraisal Form (IWP) will be assessed as per the rubrics or standards developed by the Ministry of Education for all the categories of civil servants in schools (S5 and above) starting from academic year 2019 onwards.
This uniform rubrics or standards will help avoid the earlier confusion and inconsistency.
The six domains are now Curriculum delivery and practice (25 points), holistic assessment (25 points), leadership and management (5), green school domain (5), broader learning domain (5) and community vitality (5).
There shall be three categories of clustering of schools for the conduct of ModEx depending on the number of employee to be moderated. These three categories shall be applied from 2018 performance period onwards.
The first group will be independent schools. Schools with 18 or more employees (including employees on Regular, Regular Contract, NCT from S5 – EX/ES1. Substitute Teachers are excluded) are eligible to conduct their ModEx independently without clustering with employees of other schools.
This cluster consists of a larger school with 1 or more smaller schools whose students after graduating from the smaller school, typically move up to the larger school. The third group is a cluster of Small Schools. This cluster consists of two or more small schools located within a particular geographical area.
The formation of the Moderation Committee for all the types of Moderation schools shall consist of at least three but not more than seven moderation Committee Members (including) the Chairperson and Member Secretary.
It will include all Principals and Officiating Principals at P1 to P3, all vice principals at P3 levels and above to be committee member as an interim measure and all full fledged Principals at P4 levels to be committee member as an interim measure. There are only 12 of them.
It allows the head of Department in position level P3 and above to sit as the Moderation Committee Member. However, the authority to choose the HoDs is vested with the Principal.
The RCSC said that all groups of schools have been specifically identified and listed to avoid any miscommunication in the implementation of schools clusters.
The notification for the above changes was communicated to all schools within March for implementation of the ModEx for the calendar performance year of 2018.
