The National Union of the Teaching Profession UTP had voiced out grouses by teachers on irrelevant workload in national schools. Incidentally, additional workload comes from the department efforts in introducing automation to schools with the objective to lighten teachers' workload.

Unfortunately, certain department software, instead of making teachers' workload lighter, has created more work. One such software is the Student Information System, or SMM for Sistem Maklumat Murid. SMM was designed to collect student data for the authorities to use. However, many of the information sought is irrelevant to the majority of the students and yet there are some that are sensitive to parents, especially on their household income.

The software in Access application was designed by the Schools Division, Ministry of Education. Due to sheer number of information that they sought, it had in fact, become a burden to teachers, particularly the form teachers as the information is about their class students. The MOE had recently upgraded it to version 4.0 with the information required almost double that of the previous version.

Due to the poor design of this software, it really caused a lot of hardship to the teachers. More than 60% of information is irrelevant to the majority of students with some concerning trivial matters such as hostel information, SAR, Anak Yatim, OKU, distance from school, mode of transport, details of parents. A better designed software would have separated these specific information from the common particulars that are found in the school register.

However, with almost 100 items, where all fields must be entered, the amount of work for form teachers to key in is too much and their core business of teaching-learning will certainly be affected. The system is able to detect empty fields, and when found out, school concerned have to resubmit the student data. The student data is to be updated at least three times a year.

There was a call for the minister to visit the schools to find out about the teachers' grouses. When the minister sent their officers to the schools to investigate, they only talked to the school heads. Most school heads are ignorant of what their teachers are doing.

School heads also want to impress the education officers and are reluctant to reveal many things that are unpleasant so as not to create a bad impression of their schools. If the deputy prime minister is serious in finding out the whole truth, then talk to the teachers concerned and promise them that they will not be victimised by their heads.

The minister should also find out how many automation applications the teachers are asked to underatke. What is supposed to lighten the burden sometimes ends up with the teachers more stressed out than before.

One such example is the school examination software, a product of the Johor Examination Unit. While such a software is good if schools cannot afford to buy their own, since it is distributed free, many schools in Selangor, especially in the Petaling District, already have their own examination software.

To make it compulsory to use, the Selangor Education Departmen requests for soft copies after each examination. The reason is for the department to merge all the examination results. I am just surprised that such an idea was used to force the schools to use one common software.

If the objective is to compare schools' performance, then the comparative reports ranking all the schools in this way is invalid since the school examinations are not standardised. What about the smart schools with their own examination modules?

The Chinese-vernacular schools and the residential schools also have their own custom-made software. There are schools which have invested a lot of money for complete automation solutions according to their own needs. All these schools have to comply.

In order to avoid duplication of work for the form teachers, many schools just put aside their own software. There are schools where their own software which have the necessary features based on their own requirements, They would continue to use theirs while the department’s software is assigned to different teachers just to get the soft copies requested by the department.

Something must be done to resolve all these issues as automation is supposed to lighten the teachers' workload instead of giving them an extra burden.