operation management in Oman schools

 

Introduction

In any responsible community, education providers are entitled to prepare learners to reach a better place in the career market. The Sultanate of Oman is one of the Middle East countries that focuses their attention on enhancing education and provide students with the finest levels of education in order to prepare them for a better future. As for any other country, Oman may face some challenges that can affect the agenda that targets education enhancing. Training courses and similar programs availability is a key challenge that can act as a vital barrier, for instance, in front of education development. Thus, operations management strategies can target such challenges in order to act as vital tool implemented by education leaders in schools in order to enhance students and teachers performance in general.

By definition, operations management concerns the process of designing specific operations used to control different items of any given system. It involves being responsible of the efficiency of proper predesigned operations used to control and manage the different available resources. In schools operations management is interested in achieving certain objectives, such as:

·        Developing and distributing school budget

·        Control logistics and handling purchasing needs of supplies and equipment

·        Dealing with emerging ethical and social problems of students and teachers

·        Oversee insurance issues and handling different relevant risks

·        Encourage students to participate in school events and activities

Among others, achieving the above mentioned objectives can be a main challenge that school management faces. Operation management, though, acts as a strategy to identify the proper management framework that has to be student-centered and focuses mainly on quality assurance.

Education in Oman

In Oman, education in schools is distributed through three levels having the first 6 years similar to western schools in the same level. In the recent years, education experts in Oman are attempting to improve the quality of education in Oman by increasing the budget dedicated for the ministry of education and school support. Due to language and cultural barriers, students’ parents sometimes choose to send their kids to international schools instead of public schools. In Oman, public schools are greater than international schools in numbers, in public schools the students are distributed based on single sex, with males and females are attending classrooms in separate schools. The ministry of education in Oman seeks to adopt a development strategy that targets education policies used to perform major reforms in schools and enhance education development.

The ministry of education using this strategy is attempting to reduce illiteracy rate among school children dramatically. Education is diversified among school learning and leisure activities classroom. The ministry seeks to combine both activities during the school day so that students feel engaged in school education while enhancing communication skills by supporting collaborative activities among students under the supervision of teachers and school management. Education in Oman schools in the third level, high school, encourages students to acquire scholarships in international well-known universities, either in neighboring countries, such as UAE, Jordan, Egypt, or Kuwait. Students also can have the chance to pursue their education in internationally recognized universities in UK and USA based on their abilities and the field of study they wish to pursue that can prepare them for better future.

Schools Management in Oman

As being one of the accountable Middle East country, the authorities in Oman orient greater efforts to schools and education thanks to government support and local community help. Education in Oman schools goes through three stages: primary, preparatory and secondary. In order to ensure students get the proper education in different stages, Oman government provide teachers with training through its different training institutes. In addition to public schools, Oman government has encouraged the private sector to open private schools in order to encourage it to contribute in the education system in Oman which can, in turns, enriches Oman culture and diversify it.

The schools management in Oman, especially in the public sector, emphasis shifts in the centralization system. Educational leaders in Oman believe that in order to accomplish serious school reforms they must devote greater responsibility to school principals in the decision making process by moving from centralized to decentralized management system in order to  boosting parental and community involvement in schools. Therefore, the more managers of schools are engaged in decision making the higher the opportunity will be for them to perform better operation management for the available resources. Human resources management, fro instance, can be better organized by school manager than by centralized authorities. Teacher training, hiring and rewards are better to be oriented from inside the school for instance. This can extends beyond human resources to reach the management of different kinds of resources and operations, such as funding, budget distribution, and other operations that are found to be better managed internally by school managers.

Managing Schools Resources and Operations

The main objective that any decent school management seeks after is to ensure that students and teachers interact in a caring, safe and effective learning environment. This can be achieved by doing the following actions:

·        Provide students the chance to exploit technological tools in a safe and fruitful manner

·        Properly distribute school budget to afford a safe learning environment to support creative initiatives of both students and teachers

·        Effectively invest educational software and similar applications that can facilitate the learning process while ensuring not violating software authors’ copyrights

·          Ensure that every student have full access to school laboratories in order to perform practical learning experiments

·        Design effective plans that are capable of exploiting the available human, physical and financial resources

·        Guarantee the alignment of school operations with the legal frameworks of laws and regulations set by the ministry of education

·        Ensure that decision making process is guided by the supervision and guidance of different stakeholders, such as students’ parents and teachers and allow them to propose different possible solution to current and potential educational problems

·        Encourage flexible collaboration with staff in order to invest the available school resources to meet students needs

·        Periodically review and maintain the schools assets, such as office equipment, hardware, LAN installation and network operability in order to eliminate any delay or idle time

Among others, the school management needs to focus on achieving these objectives in order to enhance its operations and provide better management tools to control current resources and, though, enhance students and teacher performance while seeking high quality education for students in order to prepare them for a better future for the sake of themselves and their country.

Operation Management in Education

By definition, operation management is a field of study that is much more relevant to manufacturing sector, where managers perform greater effort to manage the available scarce resources in production, such as workers, cycle time, materials, inventory, and similar resources that when managed will reduce costs dramatically. Recently, researchers found it is possible to make use of operations management techniques and strategies in managing and controlling operations in the service sector, and it was found to be successful. One of the important service sector fields is the education field where resources are oriented towards one main objective, which is to enhance students performance and raise their educational level so this can better prepare them for a better future and lead them to the right career.

In education, professionals who are entitled to the operation management responsibilities design and oversee functions related to the better exploiting of available resources; in schools resources can be mainly human resources, teachers and students affair employees. Resources can extend to comprehend budget, assets, such as equipment and tools used inside and outside classroom. One of the main tasks that operation managers seek to perfect is managing classrooms schedule. Classrooms scheduling is a hard task that requires collecting information about available number of empty classrooms, number of teachers, number of students per activity classroom and the amount of needed tools in each classroom; the person entitled to this task must make some mathematical modeling so that he can make sure conflicts will not happen and each teacher will have only one class at a time, the same scenario will be for classrooms and courses. Some computer applications can be used for this purpose depending on quantitative techniques of operations research, such as linear programming.

Hence, operations management in case of scheduling can play a major role in organizing the available scarce resources the school have while achieving better results out of it. Another task that operation managers are entitled to is quality control. In education, quality control can encompasses quality of different processes that take place inside the school, such as learning classrooms of different courses, leisure activities, and outside school, such as events performed in different national occasions. In order for operation management to succeed, different elements incorporated in the education process must be managed in a manner that can devise a strategy to make prediction of emerging problems and seek to find potential solutions to them.

Managers Role in Choosing the Best Operations Management Strategy

After its successful in the goods sector, operation management now ensures how profitable it will be in the service sector, especially in the education sector. As being an effective field of study that focuses on effective planning, scheduling and controlling available resources of the organization, operation management in the education filed seems to have a great importance that needs researchers to pay their attention to when they study schools in general, and Oman schools management system in particular. At schools, the process of operation management, in general, is derived from designing school system, manage current information system, ensure quality assurance, and other similar functions.

In schools, managers are entitled to take decisions about students performance, both behaviorally and educationally; other decisions such as designing the learning process with all the relevant resources it implies can be more tricky for them in most cases. For instance, managers can take longer time in preparing classes schedule in a manner that is satisfactory for both students and teachers while considering the tools, classrooms, labs, and other educational tools availability in advance. On the other hand, operation management of schools addresses other issues concerning the planning and control level. This can be better achieved with the help of professional subordinates who can participate in the decision making process regarding scheduling and roles shaping of different stakeholders in the learning process.

For any successful school manager, the best strategy he can pick will be the one that can put his feet on the right path towards achieving the school objectives. The ideal strategy must consider the following areas in order to success:

·        Students numbers in different levels of school education

·        Students number in the learning classroom

·        Proper students number in activities classroom

·        Tools availability to be used in different activities by students

·        Tools availability to be used in different activities by teachers

·        Number of teachers in different learning courses

·        Number of working hours

·        Number of classrooms in the school

·        Availability of school budget

·        Degree of decentralization and decisions that manager can take

·        Periodic maintenance of the available assets

Operations management strategy in school must include, but not limited to, the mentioned above factors which can help school principal make a good use of the available scarce resources he has in the school while achieving the school objectives eventually.

Key Responsibilities of Operation Managers in Schools

Like any job, operation managers in any sectors are entitled of specific functions to perform as part of their job; in the education field, and especially in schools, operations managers are responsible of providing administrative support for staff inside school, and act as team leader for all teachers in the school to ensure all key tasks are performed in a manner that can meet the expectations of different stakeholders, such as students' parents, for quality and timeliness; this can be best delivered through reporting, plans, schedules, and arrangement of regular meetings with them.

Therefore, the operations manager needs to satisfy the needs of everyone involved in the education process to learn about the new and operational management policies, this can be achieved by the arrangement of a transformation program dedicated for dealing with emerging issues in educational technologies and ensure to have the maximum profit out of it for the sake of students future in the first place.

Nevertheless, operations manager in school will be entitled to perform certain tasks and duties that include, but are not limited to, the following duties:

·        Ensure the development of quality management assurance and financial documents are developed, maintained, and delivered to different stakeholders

·        Making sure of delivering mechanisms for contracting and hiring new teachers based on current school requirements

·        Prepare and review operational guidelines needed for efficient management program

·        Administer and control systems and processes implementation daily, weekly and monthly

·        Ensure the school have the proper sufficient amount of assets at the beginning of every semester

·        Making sure that all the stakeholders are communicated with the requirements of different decisions made

·        Coordinate and prepare annual plans and reports

·        Distribute current budget on different procurements paths

·        Facilitate the release of funds to accomplish the annual budgeting strategy

·        Prepare updated financial records that incorporate expenses and liabilities of the school regarding different logistics and assets maintenance

·        Managing potential risks that may negatively hinder the implementation of strategies

·        Guide other stakeholders and provide them with needed assistance to set the different priorities of working schedules

·        Create a culture of teamwork surrounded with learning and understanding among team members

·        Manage cash inflows and outflows of different projects that school operates during the semester

·        Prepare an action plan for the summer semester that incorporates both learning classrooms and communication activities for students and teachers to participate in

·        Arrange for learning competitions among students in different levels and on the same level

Among others, the mentioned above duties are to be performed by the operations manager in a school with the help of other managers and teachers.

Recommendations for a Better Operations Management Strategy in Oman Schools

After discussing the current situation in Oman schools and the duties needed to be performed by operations manager in schools, the following are recommendations dedicated for tracing a good operations management strategy to be applied in Oman schools:

·        Give school principals more space for decentralized decision making

·        Communicate school events to students parents regularly

·        Allow teachers to participate in the decision making process

·        Dedicate greater budget for public schools and dedicate most of it to students activities

·        Manage and review human resources moral regularly in schools

·        Allow students to provide their feedback in schools operations

Conclusion

Education in Oman schools goes through three levels either in public or private schools, where students attend learning and leisure activities classrooms. The ministry of education in Oman does great efforts to enhance students performance and teachers moral through financing and training strategies. Operations management can be applied in the education field in order to adjust and control school issues and scheduling problems. Operations management can also be used to control quality in schools and making teachers' schedules. In order to apply operations management in Oman schools, managers should take care of certain factors and elements, such as current budget of school, number of students in class, number of teachers in schools, and other similar factors.

Schools managers have certain duties if they wish to apply operations management in schools, such as preparing an action plan for the summer semester and review and control school budget. Based on this, recommendations proposed for a good operations management strategy in Oman will target communication of information to different stakeholders and other related budgeting and decision making issues.