As a KP, personally I am not given any of the offloading you mentioned. I have the same teaching load as my department teachers. Same marking load as well. I don't think it is very fair for you to say such thing and having the illusion that real work is only done by teachers like yourselves.

What’s the increment for promotion to SEO1 anyone knows?

KP is human too!
 

I second this because as a KP myself, I have tanked most of the work in my department. 问心无愧！

Think it depends on various factors, e.g. where you currently are on the GEO5 scale, but as a rough dipstick - mine was about $500, a few years back (not very different from my GEO increments, iirc).

But really, it's probably better to just wait for the next payslip for the confirmed answer.

If you’re a teacher, why are you referring to dollar and sense which is an external publication? Use your own critical thinking skills and check your emails regularly perhaps? A HR circular has been sent out last year in September detailing every single change and how the new connect plan works.

Ya maybe will after July bonus.

Cos can't publish HR circular here ma..

New quantum of Connect Plan already out and visible in s://sso.agc.gov.sg/SL/ESIPA2001-RG1?DocDate=20201001&ProvIds=Sc1-XX-Sc1-#Sc1-XX-Sc1-
It's just that it's not published in news yet. Check under first and second schedule for contributions and payouts.

Yes 100%%%

The person must be, or else a high tier scholar.
Otherwise how to get A for a normal officer?

Even outstanding but non-scholar officers may not smell an A grade at all.
System wide unfairness

Hmm this is untrue. I am a non-scholar but have gotten As before.

And come july, will say wait for year end bonus.

Come year end, say wait for mar performance bonus.

Wait for april promotion.

The cycle keeps repeating. There's always a bonus, a payout a couple of months apart. This is their way to entice people to stay.

If you really want to quit, May would be the best time.

June bonus is pegged to economic conditions, and is usually very small. More so this year even news of possible recession.

Or maybe there are no scholars left at that paygrade, so don't need to reserve A quota for scholars.

Or the other extreme. No one is special when everyone is a scholar.

it's possible.

As a KP, you ‘tanked most of the work in your department’?

Which means the efforts of all your other colleagues only make up a MINORITY? Given that an educator’s role includes teaching hours in the classroom, department work etc, I take offence on behalf of your department members. You imply that your efforts as a single worker, outweigh the combined work of your non-KP colleagues.

It also implies that as a KP, you did not motivate your non-KP colleagues to come together as a team to achieve greater heights.

This is not true. I’m a farmer but I haven’t gotten consecutive As

This is not true. I’m a farmer but I have gotten consecutive As

what I mean is that I tanked most of the department events as they have their own personal concern and activities because they surface their personal concern/commitment e.g. need to take care of aged parents/young parents and I listen to their needs and lead the way.

Next time, please don't assume and jump to conclusion. thanks.

Thoughts bout leaving in june?
Getting June pay but forgoing the midyr bonus.

You were not clear initially, but now the blame is on me? It was you who said you tanked most of the work in the department. Nothing about ‘department events’. And now, you go on to explain their personal concerns, etc and ‘lead the way’?

A typical KP, I see. Unclear communications.

Also, department events are supposed to be distributed according to YOUR plans. You mean, officers just tell you their concerns and you will TAKE OVER the work? Isn’t that being unfair to those who do not have other commitments outside work?

Are you then depriving such officers the opportunity to learn and grow?

It’s really unhealthy for KPs to do such things. As we can clearly see here, this KP has taken over MOST of the work in his/her department, then goes on to claim credit here, and most probably in front of SLs.

So unfair to those under him/her.

Aiyo… don’t vent your frustrations online bah. Take a chill pill. Have a good break before term starts!

Ya I’m super frustrated reading such comments just before term starts. It’s like invalidating the efforts of the department members!

The person nv invalidates la. Anw, just do your best in your job can already. If you have given your best but don’t feel appreciated, then just change schools. There will surely be nasty KPs and good KPs out there. You just need to find the right place with the right ppl whom you can work best with. Our system is really quite fluid. At most just need to tolerate for 3 years.

KP delegate work to dept members = why is the SH giving so much work to do
Its so unfair!

KP takes on additional burdens to offload some of the dept members = why is the SH depriving his JOs of opportunities to shine and stand out??

This is why a lot of teachers end up being stuck where they are. You all live in a world of your own where you think that you're the only one deserving of good grades and promotion. Only GEOs do work, SEOs only shake leg and earn big bucks.

Some undeserving KPs also go on to become SLs.
Lousy people stay and go higher and higher, good people are leaving and leaving the system.
So unfortunate

The best time to leave is either in jan after getting connect payout

On in apr/may, after getting pb.

The above months factored in the 1month notice period.

Just make sure you got a job offer before you throw letter, given the economic situation.

Once you get a job offer, can quit anytime.

Rubbish. I sat on a ranking panel in the recent past and we have happily given so-called 'farmer' officers A grades before. Not just GEO2/3 BTs, but also GEO4 and 5 experienced teachers. When this happens, or alongside this, they start to get opportunities to prove themselves with bigger projects and responsibilities, just like scholars do.

Sure, they don't get 'automatic high CEP' right at the start. Sure, they will probably never make DGE or Deputy Secretary. But would I say they have no prospects and are destined to a stereotypical farmer's life? Not at all.

Agree with you. I’m also a fellow panelist on the ranking panel. Ranking system is actually a relatively fair and meritocratic process. If an officer is good, he/she is good and most people will be able to tell the quality and range of his/her work. You don’t need a “loud” RO to fight for you if your work can speak for itself. The ones who fall in the fringes are those who do decent work but nothing to wow about because they are just doing their job. If you are just doing your job, you will get your monthly salary. Bonus is for your performance at work. A C grade is actually a “good” performance. Most pple forget that or equates “hard work” as “good work”. Just because you worked hard, or super long hours, it doesn’t mean your work is good. If you are given opportunities to showcase your skills, no matter how big or small those opportunities are, and you don’t make use of them well, you have only yourself to blame

A wise man will be able to see through the clouds. I am not sure if you are the initial writer who commented that KPs are the ones who do less works and only know how to delegate work and claim credits over works done by his or her JHs.

Please, I am the opposite who listens to my JHs' needs and support them. Support also ganna distort the good intention, don't support also ganna useless.. damm hard to do leh..

I am not your RO and different RO has different style. So please be rational and look at things. If not, I will see that you just hate the whole system and everyone that is on top.

I'm not a scholar, nor am I a KP. I know that there are fair KPs and SLs like yourselves, and I really respect you guys. Unfortunately, the truth is that good people like you aren't common. I wish more of KPs like yourselves can be part of my career.

I am a GEO4 who got a C with quantum 1.5 only despite doing school wide projects, and also a demanding workload. What is really fair or unfair? No one actually really knows because ranking is pretty much the least transparent activity in this system. KPs and SLs will cite confidentiality as the main reason, and I completely understand that, which is why I choose to just accept it.

However, because it is such a grey area, many politics come into play, because humans are still the ones running the system. When I was still back in NIE, a current school KP shared that ranking is one of the most controversial activities, despite the fact that they "try to be as fair as possible". He was visibly uncomfortable when answering questions from student teachers, and I suppose we can't blame him either, since there is always a higher power supervising the KPs.

Some would suggest a toxic panel and to change schools. But things are not so straightforward as to just "oh I can transfer, just need to wait 3 years". A colleague of mine has been trying and failing to transfer out every year due to "excess teachers" elsewhere. Another one could not transfer and was blocked due to "shortage of manpower" in the current school.

To some extent, we can only depend on luck sometimes.

This reflects the problem we have in the mindset of the management.

Teaching is a semi-white collar job. It is a frontline job first and foremost, and the real part of the job lies in teaching, which is what a TEACHER should be primarily doing.

If there is no teacher, there is no teaching, there is no learning, and there is no school.

But somewhere along the line, there is this corruption of ideology, where work appraisal starts to pervert itself and warp into the current situation where 'policy and planning' work are appraised more highly than teaching work.

A teacher with a heavy teaching load (and as a result has no time for other stuff), is appraised to have a lower performance than someone with a lighter load, and therefore have more capacity for "higher-impact" policy or planning tasks.

Teaching load is definitely not the same for all teachers. And even if they share the same number of contact hours, the profile of the class can significantly add on to the teaching load as well (e.g. grad classes, tail end classes, classes with special needs students).

During covid, when it's common to have teams of teachers 'wiped out' by quarantine orders or 5-day MCs, the impact of missing teachers became so obvious.

When teachers who tanked a lot of teaching load are down, and others have to cover their classes, it is really not easy to cover their load.

Those are the quiet workers who contributed most to the school. The school cannot function, cannot exist without teachers who work hard to teach their classes.
They are the ones delivering the most impact to students.

Those committees which are in the limelight, highly visible to school management, are not really that impactful. The fact that schools can stand down on CCA and other events for 2 years, is testament to how unimportant these things really are.

The management's mental model of what constitutes 'high impact' needs to change.

That quiet, overwhelmed teacher who needs to teach 5-6 high needs classes (or sometimes the entire cohort even), is no less deserving of an A compared to someone who is in the limelight planning high visibility programmes or events.

That said, because ranking is relative, there are also teachers who manage to teach multiple difficult classes well & contribute to high impact projects. Rare, but they exist, and in comparison, these are the ones who will stand out. Wish there would be a better system though

I totally empathise with your situation as I was in your shoes a few years back in my previous school. I could only see the light at the end of the tunnel after I switched school. My previous school surprisingly gave me a higher grade for the year when I left the school, further convincing me that they actually wanted me to leave.

There are places which you just don't fit it probably due to the culture, people etc. Don't keep banging against closed windows and find a way out instead. MOE is bigger than just your current school. At least try to transfer once or twice before giving up on the system.

In my experience (granted, it's only a couple of schools, so it's not universal) doing ranking, teachers who add more value to holistic development outcomes in higher needs classes than teachers who add little value to low needs classes will always be ranked higher.

Value add doesn't only mean exam results. Boosting conduct grades, improving school-parent working relationship, developing students' self-confidence or leadership skills, is also something one can declare in their EPMS and be validated for during appraisal.

It is possible to make high impact in difficult classes. But also must be thick skin to write in EPMS form, and be ready to give examples and show evidence during work review. I know many experienced, older teachers don't care about perf grade anymore and don't bother boasting about this type of good work. But this is aimed at those who think they are condemned to get C grade forever just because they "specialise" in high needs students.

Is it true that the enrollment numbers of teachers has slowed down over the years and MOE is only hiring scholars now? Wouldn’t it be one a huge problem in the future in terms of ranking etc?

staff
 

yes someone provided real figures here taken from mof last week abt destruction in numbers . thars real. no of course they don’t hire scholars only - not possible.
if you know or read widely enugh on broader trends in the economy u will understand why though. there is just not enugh manpower to go around.

Very interested to know how the new geo5a will be given to *ahem* deserving old-timers before throwing in the towel

Your observation is spot on.

Remove a couple of KPs who do not do much teaching and the system gets better for everyone in it.

I would even go as far to claim that preparing decent teaching resources that enable students to learn is harder than planning, doing admin and generally creating work for the sake of it for the KP's own KPIs.

The scenario is not simply a comparison between teaching high needs vs low needs class.

The situation on the ground is that different teachers hold different types of portfolios, as different as apples and oranges. But management seems to prefer apple or orange over the other.

For example, take a comparison of 2 teachers of same age and same paygrade.

Teacher A:
Due to manpower shortage in the department, need to take on additional classes and graduating classes. Timetable is overloaded. In other areas, just an ordinary committee member, ordinary CCA teacher.
Burn 80h weeks doing T&L related stuff (lessons, homework marking, exam-related stuff, testimonial, additional classes for grad classes)

Teacher B:
Normal class load, or maybe lower, and appointment as CCA OIC and committee head/2ic. Placed in charge to plan and lead a major school event, for example, NE week leading up to national day, or organise the school's anniversary celebration and coordinating with the VIPs attending the event. Also burn 80h work weeks doing all these stuff.

In terms of time and effort, both teachers are definitely not slacking, and are working too hard.
But when it comes to appraisal, teacher B will be favoured over teacher A, because the system deems such non-academic work as being 'more impactful'.
Which is not necessarily true.

Just because an event involved the entire school population, got VIPs involved, it doesn't make it more important than learning in the classroom.

At the end of the day, if we ask the real stakeholders, the parents and students, if they were to choose to between lessons and school event, which would they think is more important, the answer is quite obvious.

The priorities are severely misplaced in the appraisal of teachers.

That’s why some teachers prioritise committee work over remedial classes and consultations with students! Consultations and remedial add little value towards appraisal as compared to committee work.