SEN. Sherwin Gatchalian on Saturday urged the new administration to decongest the workload of public school teachers so that they could focus on their teaching duties.
Gatchalian, who chairs the Senate Committee on Basic Education, Culture and the Arts, emphasized that decongesting the workload of teachers affects the quality and delivery of education to the country's K to 12 learners.
The senator said that in 2019 the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) pointed out that the actual teaching is sidelined by other administrative and student support roles of teachers, as well as their participation in programs like mass immunizations, deworming and elections, among others, which affect the quality of their instruction.
One of the immediate steps that Gatchalian proposes is for the Department of Budget and Management to release funds for the 5,000 administrative officers (AO) in public elementary and high schools under the Department of Education (DepEd). The department has already requested the release of these funds.
In the long run, there should be enough non-teaching personnel based on the school structure and staffing pattern, which the DepEd Bureau of Human Resource and Organizational Development (BHROD) is expected to study and develop with the Research Center for Teacher Quality (RCTQ).
Gatchalian urged the DepEd to adopt the proposal of PIDS to conduct evidence-based studies on teacher workload.
This is to rationalize the job functions of public school teachers, allow them to balance their workload and allocate more of their time to improve learner outcomes.
The proposed study on teacher workload is one of Gatchalian's top three recommendations when he reported the basic education panel's findings on the implementation of the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers (Republic Act 4670).
"For the welfare of our teachers, we should ensure that they spend most of their time focusing on their students. It is important that we decongest the workload of public school teachers from those that are not directly related to their teaching duties, especially that it is the students who will benefit from this," said Gatchalian.
