By: Saima Hamid
Administration establishes policies that guide decision making set laws and regulations. It is an operational process through which an educational institute is maintained in good working condition. In other words, school management is the set of processes of managing the resources, communication and tasks involved in running a school system.
American Association of School Administration describes administration as “the total of the processes through which appropriate human and material resources are made available and made effective for accomplishing the purpose of an enterprise.” Often, school administration focuses on planning, organizing, coordinating, directing, controlling and evaluating student’s performance, providing leadership for the education of student, developing curriculum and managing the educational institution’s resources for achieving specific goals. Each and every social institution has its objectives and in the same way school administration too has its objectives. Some of its main objectives include providing education to students, ensuring utilization of resources, measuring performance of the student and promoting student’s success.
Among the above stated objectives let us try to analyse the second objective, i.e, Utilization of resources. First of all, let us find out what are the resources of School administration. Various important resources of school administration include students, teaching faculty, non-teaching staff, physical infrastructure (Library, classrooms, laboratory, playground etc). In general, first three are human resources and fourth one is material resource. The school administrator has to utilize all the resources both human as well as material properly so as to achieve the specific goals effectively.
As we know the very fact that school administration needs integration and co-ordination of all the physical and human resources and educational elements, it requires great efficiency which is based on human sympathy, understanding, knowledge and skill. The physical resources mainly contribute building equipment’s and instructional materials. The human resources include pupils, teachers, supervisors, administrators and parents. The additional elements comprise the various aspects of educational theory and practice including philosophy of education, objectives of education, curriculum, method of teaching, discipline, role of the teacher, rules and regulations etc.
These elements are ‘parts’ made into ‘whole’ and are components brought into harmonious relationship. So, the purpose of doing such vital task is to fulfil different purposes, objectives of school administration including to provide proper education to students. This objective seeks to mention the fact that good education doesn’t mean education at a very high cost as is practiced in modern public schools. Rather it means the right type of education from the right type of teachers within reasonable cost.
It also means to ensure adequate utilization of all resources as, for adequate realization of the various purposes of educational programme, there is the need of ensuring adequate utilization of all available resources-human, material and financial.
It also works to ensure professional ethics and professional development among teachers as teachers are the senior and mature human elements to accelerate the programme in time and their role is highly felt in this regard. They are to be encouraged and given the facility to devise and try out innovative ideas on instruction and to participate in service education programmes. In this context, it can be visualized that educational administration should aim at developing a desire for hard work, dedication and commitment for their job among teachers.
One other objective of this is to organize educational programmes for acquainting students with the art of democratic living and giving them excellent training in democratic citizenship.
Human resource management in relation to school can be summarized as- develop a position description. It should be accurate and well written, as it helps to clarify the skills, knowledge and experience, advertise the position, chose a media platform like newspaper, electronic media etc. it also requires to receive and screen applications to choose suitable candidates and conduct interviews with suitable candidates to make a selection decision.
In our country, the same thing is done systematically as stated above. But what is questionable regarding human resource management in our schools is that they don’t show all the characters which are well established in western countries. Fr instance, in western countries the manager of the school while evaluating teacher’s performance uses creative and preventive type of supervision so as to boost the aptitude of their Juniors (teachers) which in turn proves beneficial for achieving the specific goals of the schools. On the other hand, in India including our J&K UT most of the managers of the school consider themselves as bosses and forget that they are one of the components of the same social institution like others. So, they mostly use corrective type of supervision in order to satisfy their ego and to enjoy their supremacy in such institutions. The school managers while doing so put a cap on the specific goals which a school needs to achieve, as the said behaviour of the school manager might act as a stumbling block in the way of a teacher’s aptitude.
So, keeping the above stated things in mind our school managers should always try to encourage the efforts of their juniors as this will automatically lead an institution to achieve its specific goals in a much better way.
The author can be mailed at darsaimahamid@gmail.com
