30 Aug 2024

Parliament has been informed that consistent with the Scheme of Services of 1994, promotion for primary school heads, teachers and education officers was and is still limited.

Answering a question on Wednesday, Minister of Education and Skills Development, Honourable Dr Douglas Letsholathebe said the situation was not peculiar to primary head teachers only.

Dr Letsholathebe said as a result of the implementation of levels of operation in 2013, primary school head teachers were upgraded from D4 to D2. However, he said Principal Education Officers (PEO) who were on D3 scale believed that they should be upgraded to D1, as they supervised the head teachers.

“This led to a court case in which PEO contested that they should be remunerated at a higher scale than that of primary school heads teachers. The PEOs lost this case,” he said. He said according to the Job Effectiveness Descriptions (JEDs), head teachers were directly supervised by the regional director who was at E1 salary scale. He said primary school heads in question transferred on their own volition to join a different cadre on the basis of promotion from D4 to D3.

“Their progression thus changed to follow the career path of PEOs,” he said. In addition, he said, the positions that they vacated were filled upon their promotion to PEOs, hence they had no positions to revert back to.

Notably, he said the current deputy school head teachers had a legitimate expectation to grow into primary school head teachers as positions fell vacant mainly due to retirement. He said filling the vacant positions of primary school head teachers with PEOs who were former school heads had the potential to evolve into an employment relations issue.  

Member of Parliament of Francistown, Mr Wynter Mmolotsi had asked the minister whether he was aware that previously one of the requirements to be appointed as a PEO was to have been a primary school head for some time.

Mr Mmolotsi also asked if the minister was aware that after promoting some head teachers to the position of PEO, school heads were upgraded to a salary scale higher than that of PEOs.

He also wanted to know if the minister would consider allowing those affected PEOs to revert to their previous positions.