Watching a video on Instagram, in which teachers at a school in Dubai were dancing to a Bollywood number to welcome the children back to school after the summer vacations, seemed to make a mockery of the profession. Even the principal had joined in, and the group looked less like educationists and more like monkeys in a circus.
The video came as a stark reminder of the lengths educational institutions will go to attract clients (aka students). As consumerism and materialism are at an all-time high, these marketing techniques make perfect business sense; schools nowadays are like corporate entities, with dedicated departments managing Finance, Accounts, Marketing, PR and HR. Private schools, in a bid to woo clients, will employ every tactic possible and go to every possible length to entice students, as education is an extremely lucrative business, not only in this country but all over the world.
Schools have dedicated PR and media departments (as mentioned earlier) that make sure the school is active on social media. All the extra- and co-curricular activities conducted in schools are captured on video, edited and uploaded on their social media handles. As the competition intensifies and schools chase admissions, enrolling your child in the right school is also a status symbol, just like owning the latest mobile phone or the right car, befitting your status.
Just like window shopping, parents school-hop, and it is becoming increasingly normal to change their children’s schools every couple of years. Schools will very rarely expel students or rusticate them because losing a client means losing money, and in business, the customer is always right.
However, a certain degree of legal protection and transparent HR policies will help to ensure a certain degree of job security for the employees, leading to higher employee retention and greater productivity.
In fact, in many prestigious schools, teachers help students during examinations; it is not unheard of for students to be taken to a separate room and have the entire paper dictated to them. But then, as people would say, everything is fair in love, war and business, and when so much money is at stake, it makes complete sense to employ all kinds of underhand tactics and promote students year after year to ensure that the school does not lose a client.
So, where is education in all this? Very low down on the list of priorities. If education is a business, then the customer is always right, and profit maximisation is the main objective, whether that means falsifying results or misrepresenting the performance of students in summative assessments to keep the parents happy, who are, after all, paying the salaries and cannot afford to be upset or offended at any cost.
Educationists are expected to keep all the stakeholders happy if they hope to cement their position in the organisation. Even that is no guarantee, for whenever a cheaper resource is found, they will be replaced on one pretext or another to keep costs down. Contracts drawn up are all in favour of the employer and offer little or no relief to the employees. Obviously, employees are also not loyal to the organisations they work for (unless they have children in the same school) and switch at the drop of a hat whenever they are offered a higher salary.
Employee turnover in private schools is especially high due to massive workloads and the constant pressure to keep everyone happy. There was a very interesting expression that the writer came across on social media, which mentioned that there is no tried-and-tested recipe for success, but a surefire recipe for failure is trying to please everyone! Who suffers? The students, of course! As turnover rises and teachers come and go, this inability on the part of schools to retain their employees, the most important stakeholder in the equation, backfires on the clients. Some schools are notorious for very high staff turnover due to immense workloads, rigid and inflexible school policies, and an unruly and undisciplined student body. An attempt to keep everyone happy often comes at the expense of the mental and physical health of educationists.
Employee-friendly HR policies and procedures, the provision of legal rights, and ensuring job security would really help to diffuse the intensity and gravity of high employee turnover in schools. In addition to salary, medical benefits, gratuity, performance-based incentives and other facilities would help ensure employee loyalty and improve retention. Although employee policy manuals are drawn up, these are generally not made available to employees, and the majority have very little idea of the terms and conditions governing their contracts.
The majority have no option but to adhere to organisational policies and procedures and can only agonise or complain about the lack of transparency and accountability. Most of these regulations are not employee-friendly and can easily be overruled and overwritten when the situation arises. Working in the private sector means that, generally, there is very little or zero job security, and employees can be fired at a moment’s notice without really being offered any explanation.
The legal route means opening another Pandora’s box, and the majority do not have the time, energy or resources to explore or avail themselves of it. Most of us are just working to make two ends meet while ensuring our children have access to a decent education. However, a certain degree of legal protection and transparent HR policies will help ensure a certain degree of job security for employees, leading to higher employee retention and greater productivity.