Teacher Performance Reviews for Kenyan Schools
Written by EduCore Team · Nairobi, Kenya ·
Student performance gets a merit list, a growth trend, a dashboard. Teacher performance, at most schools, gets a Principal's private notebook or a paper form filed once a term and rarely looked at again. Here's what that costs a school, and how EduCore keeps the record instead -- structured, private to the people it actually concerns, and never an algorithm's score.
Where an informal review falls apart
A Deputy Principal sits in on a lesson, forms a judgment, and writes it down somewhere -- a notebook, a loose form, a memory they intend to act on later. Six months on, at the next TSC appraisal cycle or a difficult conversation about a teacher's classroom management, that judgment either isn't written down anywhere retrievable, or it's one sheet of paper in a file cabinet that only shows the most recent review, not the pattern across a full year.
The other failure mode is the opposite problem: a review that is too visible. A performance note meant for a Principal and a teacher ends up readable by whoever has access to the shared drive it was saved on, which makes reviewers softer on paper than they'd be in the room -- exactly the outcome a private, structured record is supposed to prevent.
A record built for judgment, not an algorithm
Termly and annual, in one history
A review is either tied to the current term or stands alone as an annual review -- both live in the same record for a teacher, not two separate processes to keep in sync.
Scored, not summarized from memory
Classroom management, subject knowledge, punctuality, and collaboration, each scored 1 to 5. The overall rating is computed automatically as their average the moment a review is saved -- never a separate number a reviewer has to keep consistent by hand.
Visible to two people, on purpose
The reviewer tier -- Principal, Deputy Principal, School Owner -- and the teacher the review is about. Nobody else in the school can open it, enforced the same way as every other record in EduCore: at the database, not just hidden in the interface.
A history, not a single sheet
Every review a teacher has ever received stays on file, newest first -- a pattern across terms and years, not just whatever was filled in most recently.
No AI score. No deleting a review that turned out inconvenient.
A teacher performance review is deliberately kept out of EduCore's AI Assistant entirely. It's a Principal's or Deputy's own assessment of what they observed, not a score generated on their behalf -- the same distinction the system draws for a student's merit list, applied to the adults running the classroom instead of the learners in it.
And once a review is saved, it can be corrected but not deleted -- there is no delete option in the database policy at all. If a score was entered wrong, the fix is an update that leaves a clear trail, not a quiet removal of the fact that a review happened.
This is EduCore's Teacher Performance Management system -- structured competency scoring, a computed overall rating, and a review history kept exactly as private as it needs to be.
Frequently asked questions
Can a school track competencies beyond the default four?
The data model doesn't hard-code them -- competency scores are stored as flexible key/value pairs precisely so a school's categories could evolve without a database change. But the review form itself only offers the four defaults (classroom management, subject knowledge, punctuality, collaboration) today; there's no "add a competency" control in the interface yet.
If a reviewer enters a score by mistake, can the review be deleted?
No -- a review can be corrected via an update, but there's no delete option. That's deliberate, the same precedent EduCore applies to its audit log: a performance review is a historical record, and the fact that one existed at a point in time is never silently erased, even if its content gets revised afterward.
Is the overall rating something a reviewer types in?
No. A reviewer only scores individual competencies from 1 to 5. The overall rating is computed by a database trigger as the average of whatever numeric scores were entered, the moment the review is saved -- there's no separate field for it, so it can't drift out of sync with the competency scores behind it.
Does a teacher get notified when a review about them is saved?
Not automatically -- there's no notification or email tied to saving a review. A teacher sees it by opening their own performance record, which their account has read access to under the same rule that keeps everyone else out: visible to the reviewer tier and to the person being reviewed, nobody else.
Can a Deputy Principal be reviewed too, or only classroom teachers?
Deputy Principals are reviewable, alongside teachers and class teachers -- the reviewable-staff list isn't limited to the classroom. A Deputy Principal's review would typically come from the Principal or School Owner tier above them.
What actually stopped a score of 9 or -3 from being saved?
A real gap that got fixed, not a hypothetical: the score inputs on the review form aren't inside an HTML <form>, so the browser's own min/max validation never ran, and the database's rating trigger just quietly drops anything non-numeric or out of range from its average rather than rejecting the row. A validation step now checks every score is a finite number between 1 and 5 before a review can save at all.
See a teacher performance review saved, start to finish.
A demo walks through scoring a review as a Principal or Deputy, and what the teacher sees on their own side.