Importance of Policies in School Education Ecosystem

Policy is generally an intent, a set of rules and principles, adopted for ease of governance within an organisation. It is fundamentally important for organisations to have implementable policies, as it forms a linking pin between the school management, teachers, students, parents, and the rule of law. An organisation without policy is an organisation without control.

If there are no formal policies, then organisation staff at any level would have no guidance on how to make right consistent decisions. Imagine, a parent approaches a teacher, and requests to view her child’s answer script. If the school has no proper policy on Assessments, the choice on whether to show the answer paper might depend upon which teacher she spoke to, or whether the teacher she speaks to is having a bad day. In short, an absence of policy leads to inconsistency of decision making.

Not everyone understands why policies exist – some people view them as being bureaucratic and overbearing. In reality, as the school management cannot be everywhere all the time to ensure staff carry out their tasks correctly and responsibly, policies provide useful and necessary assistance. Rules therefore help to decrease the amount of direct supervision by the management, and at the same time increase the efficiency of work processes.

Besides, policies are also important because they help a school establish model operating procedures and create standards of quality for learning and safety, as well as expectations and accountability. Without these, institutions would lack the structure and function necessary to provide the educational needs of students. Eventually, policies are key for the success of a school, and provides many other privileges provided they are written well and kept up to date.

Internal Controls

Organisational policies should serve as an important form of internal control. Policy form as a control mechanism that will effectively limit the behaviour of teaching and non-teaching staff. Instructions could be that two teachers must be involved in any assessment process, one to correct the answer script, and another to audit the sheet. Policy should always be enforced through some kind of scrutinising mechanism, or it will be a weak internal control. School management can make life easier by creating proper internal controls that are enforceable.

Minimise Costs:

Management always feel the need to minimise costs. This can take the form of examining the real amount of resources required for what the School actually needs, such as finding the cheapest suppliers without sacrificing quality. It can also be about limiting the financial losses that can cripple school operations, such as shortages, wastages, errors and other kinds of losses. When policies address potential sources of risk and require employees to know them, it creates awareness of the need for risk management. It is best to ensure that employees comply with company policies intended to minimise risk.

Maintain Compliance

School policies must enable the organisation to maintain a degree of accountability in the eyes of internal and external stakeholders. School has an obligation towards the law of the land. Compliance is to follow these established defined statutory procedures and practices. Educational policies are rules that are intended to help schools teach students efficiently, fairly and safely as per the regulatory norms, and the Board to which the Institution is affiliated. These terms determine how students are taught, what they are taught, how schools manage students and its personnel.

Build a Learning Culture

Academics being the major service of a school, it is mandatory to create a learning culture by encouraging the staff to continuously add to their knowledge. This includes determining which capability each staff should acquire and creating a process for updating it throughout the year. For example, a policy to have a staff competency matrix and training need analysis for all staff must be completed before becoming eligible for the appraisal. Initially each staff learning should include a checklist of tasks, such as required training and development, work samples and formal learning instructions.

Safe Learning Environments

Students, teachers and staff members deserve to feel physically and psychologically secure in their environment. Policies influence how safe individuals are in school. In order to create this environment, guidelines need to be developed and reinstated that establish safety standards for the physical environment and mental state of students and staff. Disciplined rules have an effect on the safety of students and staff at school level, therefore, procedures should extend beyond the classroom, frequency of fire drills, anti-bullying, and how staff should respond during a medical emergency.

Setting Goals and Establishing Productivity

Students and teachers are the major customers of all the policies in a school. Management should establish standard rules to guide acceptable behaviour, and help create a conducive learning environment. All of these are necessary to help the institution run smoothly to ensure that students receive a quality education. In order for an institution to encourage higher learning, plans must be in place that establish goals as set forth by the school management. This is important for relating education to the community and making it responsible to the larger world. Accountability through the use of goal-oriented policies ensures productivity – thus save time, prevent confusion and unify the school.

Suspension and Expulsion

Although the law strictly disapproves it, the school should be very careful in determining when a student should be suspended or expelled, because it can impact a child's future. Although it is common to expel students for excessive violations of school rules, this is not always a good option for dealing with behaviour problems. When a child is expelled, he may lose his desire to continue attending traditional institution and quit. Suspension policies can inadvertently discourage students from attending school, leading to a lifetime of low-paying jobs or dependency of others. For this reason, it is important to have policies that incorporate other solutions before resorting to suspension and expulsion.

Equality

Equality in the schools is again determined by it’s policies. School must have guidelines requiring acts of discrimination to be reported to their administrators and to be remedied promptly. There are also rules in place to make sure that children with disabilities, or slow-learners, receive the same access to an education as other students. This ensures that everyone gets the opportunity to contribute to society and thrive economically.

Teacher Engagement

Another important thing is that policies on teacher training and engagement should focus more on the professional continuum of teachers. Teacher engagement is the key element for teacher retention, including teacher interventions, and their continuous professional development all over their career – they are a whole and they are interconnected. A proper workplace policy also aims to guide teaching and non-teaching staff in how to perform in the school for various prohibited issues in – harassment, internet use, health and safety, and social media are just a few.

Stakeholder involvement

Last but not the least, collaboration between all the stakeholders should be much larger. It is extremely important that everyone is involved in the policy-making, that each stakeholder has his/her role, and should be able to take that role into the process. Schools should have well-documented and comprehensive policies and standard-operating-procedures for all the internal and external stake holders.

Having well-developed policies and rules can empower the School to:

• help teachers and students know what is expected of them with respect to standards of behaviour and performance.
• set guidelines for decision-making in routine situations so that teachers and managers do not need to continually ask senior management what to do.
• help to adopt a consistent and clear response across the school to continually refer to situations involving any interactions between peers, students and parents.
• allow to demonstrate good faith that employees will be treated fairly and equally.
• allow to have an accepted method of dealing with complaints and misunderstandings in place to help avoid favouritism.
• set a framework for delegation of decision-making.
• give a means of communicating information to all stakeholders.
• offer protection from breaches of legislations, compliances, etc.

Subsequent to the policies being established, it is important to convey decisions that are made on a school level to the relevant stakeholders, students, teachers and other staff. Because it is necessary that they know which decisions have been taken, why they have been taken and what the whole rationale behind this decision was, the management should really focus on the strict adherence to them, as it only stays valuable as long as they are properly implemented and monitored.