Fiji Head Teachers Association president Johnson Rura has cautioned school leaders not to rely on personal connections to advance their careers, telling delegates at the Lautoka, Nadi and Yasawa Head of Schools Symposium yesterday that established processes must be respected. Speaking at the Tanoa Waterfront Hotel on March 17, Rura said bypassing district and divisional channels to contact senior officials was creating problems across the education system.
“Our association is a professional body so please follow the processes and procedures – your district officers are here; your divisional officers are here,” Rura told the gathering. He warned that some individuals have been going directly to the Permanent Secretary or the Minister of Education to seek promotions or favours, a practice he described as unacceptable. “Don’t do that. Follow the process. If you know you need to be promoted—due diligence of following the process needs to be always adhered to.”
Rura emphasised that head teachers should be grateful for the positions they currently hold while continuing to pursue career progression through the right channels. He confirmed that the proper channels of communication had been circulated to district offices and urged members to route concerns through those offices first. At the same time, he said the association’s leadership — its presidents and vice-presidents — provides an alternative formal avenue for raising issues, provided established protocols are followed.
“You can use both channels as long as you get what you want and the issues are resolved. But please just follow the channel of communication that are in place,” Rura said, reiterating his call for professionalism and transparency in the promotion process.
The warning is the latest development in a wider debate over human resources management in Fiji’s education sector. In August 2025 Rura publicly criticised the Education Ministry’s HR feedback loop for slow responses to teacher vacancies and called for a more responsive, unified HR hub to speed up the filling of vacant posts. At that time the ministry’s acting Human Resources Unit director, Taniela Domoni, said the team was reviewing processes to address those concerns.
Rura’s comments at the symposium link those earlier criticisms to a governance issue: while faster HR processing remains a priority, he signalled that circumventing established procedures undermines fairness and could frustrate efforts to improve the system. By pressing heads of schools to follow district and divisional pathways — and to use the association’s formal channels when necessary — Rura appears to be seeking a balance between advocating for timely HR reform and preserving orderly, accountable methods for staff movements and promotions.
Leave a comment