November 23, 2020
Rwanda Education Board (REB) with support from United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) through Inspire Educate and Empower Rwanda (IEE) is in final stages of restructuring the Teacher Management Information System (TMIS) which was originally developed in 2012 and whose restructuring has been underway since 2016.
TMIS is a system that has been used by REB since then to cater for teacher management processes ranging from recruitment, registration, licensing and allocating incentives for the teachers, planning of capacity development for the teachers which has a lot to do with their trainings, and generally supports the entire business of Teacher Development and Management Department at REB.
TMIS restructuring takes into consideration recent trends in the Education sector including revised Teacher Statutes, and the newly revised Teacher Development and Management (TDM) Policy. It is intended that TMIS caters for all aspects of the statutes and the TDM policy that relate to teacher management.
Among the new processes is the teacher recruitment process which was previously a responsibility of the districts but under the new statutes, it is a responsibility of the Ministry of Education through REB and although REB works with the districts when it comes to advertising available vacancies and administering teachers’ interview examinations, all these responsibilities are the sole responsibility of REB- hence TMIS will be useful in tracking teacher trends.
Theogene Kayumba, Director of IT at REB notes that there is need to have a tool that can be used to support vast teacher management activities of REB from requests of teachers from schools, adverts for available jobs, the shortlisting process, management of teacher interview examination results and deployment of teachers to schools among others.
The TMIS is set to solve several challenges and Kayumba explains that it will help in efficient management of the records of the teachers. ‘’If a candidate fills in their personal information at the start of the process, it will be stored so that one doesn’t always fill that part when they go to the next level/stage in the system which will in turn save a lot of time,’’ he noted.
He states that in the past, candidates have been using handwritten documents some of which were illegible but with the system, that issue will be solved and the system will ensure that there is reduction in human error as it is known that when people work for long, they are bound to make mistakes which is not the case with the TMIS. With TMIS, REB will be able to adequately provide quality management services to teachers in support for effective teaching and learning for Rwandan children.
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