Mumbai: In a significant move aimed at easing the burden on the teaching community, the school education department has issued a new directive designating Saturdays exclusively for administrative work, data filing and report submission.The move is expected to alleviate a substantial amount of non-educational paperwork that has traditionally eaten into instructional hours.For years, civil society groups and several prominent educationists have raised alarms over the excessive non-educational tasks imposed on school teachers. Activists have frequently pointed out that requiring educators to constantly compile data, fill out overlapping forms and file repetitive reports each year severely compromises the quality of classroom learning by leaving very little time for teachers to actually teach.Currently, teachers navigate 38 different apps, portals and websites like DIKSHA (training), U-DISE (infrastructure and enrolment) and NIPUN Bharat Dashboard (assessments).Under the new guidelines, all online and offline information requested from schools will now be processed systematically on Saturdays, preventing administrative chores from spilling over into regular teaching days.However, school representatives point out that formalising Saturday reporting is only part of the solution. They note that informal communication channels continue to disrupt daily schooling.Mahendra Ganpule, former vice-president of the Maharashtra School Principal Association, emphasised the need to curb unregulated data demands. “Education officials at different levels regularly demand some or the other information on WhatsApp from schools almost on a daily basis and this causes endless stress and administrative work for schools and should be stopped.”Welcoming the govt’s directive, Madhav Suryavanshi, a teacher at the Khar Education Society School and coordinator of the Shikshan Vikas Manch, said: “The decision taken by the education department to submit online and offline information requested from schools every Saturday is very welcome. This decision will relieve teachers of the work of collecting and presenting information repeatedly. As a result, more of their time will be available for teaching, interacting with students and quality improvement activities. Since the main work of teachers is teaching, it is necessary for them to be freed from administrative work to some extent.”Ganpule said the ultimate fix lies in systemic reform and better synchronisation rather than just moving deadlines.Experts suggest that during data input across all schools, there is currently a massive amount of repetition, with the exact same data being funnelled into many different forms and separate submissions. “To drastically reduce this administrative workload for teachers, better coordination is needed between various govt departments and organisations, to reduce needless and repeated work.”
