Functional Review of the Ministry of Education, Science and ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

The review builds on these two lists to help the MEST build on its strengths and deal with the weaknesses. Organizational structure From the organizational points of view, there are two key issues - balance of resources (numbers of people in different areas), - organization of the resources into units. According to the document provided by the MEST in February 2009, the MEST employed 235 employees 2 (164 without Inspection Department) 3 organized into the Minister’s Cabinet, Permanent Secretary’s Office (PS’s Office), 9 departments, 14 divisions, 14 sectors and some further units. For assessment purposes, we have made comparisons of the MEST with similar ministries in 6 small EU states (EU-6) with regard to staff numbers. The comparisons show smaller staff numbers at the MEST in general as well as in certain areas. The situation is documented by the Charts No 1 – 4. The Chart No 1 shows that the MEST has the smallest staff in comparison with all EU-6 ministries. The next 3 charts show that the situation is different when looking at the staff numbers in 4 broad areas. While the situation in education and general support areas is comparable with EU-6 ministries, the numbers of staff in R&D area and in special support area is far lower in Kosovo than anywhere else. We think that this is one of the reasons of poor performance of the MEST in these areas (see our findings below). Chart 1 Chart 2 2 In fact, during the review we received several slightly different information on the staff numbers. We had to decide to take one version for comparisons presented in the report. On the other hand, the differences in information have not been substantial for the purposes of the report. 3 In order to not distort the comparisons, we avoid sometimes the Inspection Department containing 71 posts deployed throughout the country from our considerations. EU-6 ministries do not contain such a department at the ministry level. 8
Chart 3 Chart 4 In terms of how the existing resources are organized into units, the biggest problem perceived currently by the MEST’s top management, which was stressed by MEST’s representatives at almost all meetings we had, was that of the MEST’s organizational structure. It is true that the current state of the MEST’s organizational structure is highly problematic from several points of view. For example, there is no officially valid organogram. Further, according to the de-facto organogram (see the upper-level organizational structure scheme in Scheme 1) the Permanent Secretary has to coordinate 16 units. The organization is far from optimal also at the lower level of the organizational structure. The MEST is currently using organizational structure with 3 layers, comprising departments, divisions, sectors (and also Minister’s cabinet and Permanent Secretary’s office with offices within them). The average number of positions in 9 departments is 11.8, in 14 divisions it is 6.1 and in 14 sectors it is 1.8 (again, the Department of Inspection is excluded). Out of 14 sectors, 8 contain just 1 post. From the point of view of administration, having a unit with 1 post has no sense. It is also clear that narrowly defined units decrease flexibility organizing the work. The situation in EU-6 ministries and its comparison with Kosovo is shown in Table 1. 9
Page 1 and 2: Functional Review and Institutional
Page 3 and 4: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This report prese
Page 5 and 6: Introduction This report presents r
Page 7: have been assessed and reviewed by
Page 11 and 12: Based on this analysis, we make 2 r
Page 13 and 14: Recommendation A.12: Gradually add,
Page 15 and 16: iii) Division of special education,
Page 17 and 18: Internal Audit In the small EU coun
Page 19 and 20: There is the basic IT support, whil
Page 21 and 22: Table 2: Comparisons of agencies in
Page 23 and 24: Pre-university Education Developmen
Page 25 and 26: Table 3: Lower level of the recomme
Page 27 and 28: Based on the new R&D strategy decid
Page 29 and 30: Annex 1: List of interviews Organiz
Page 31: Annex 2: FRIDOM’s comments on the

Functional Review of the Ministry of Education, Science and ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?