Provincial Education Minister Syed Sardar Ali Shah has said a policy on teachers’ licensing will be presented to the Sindh cabinet in the near future.
“The teachers’ licences will be a sign of a teacher’s professional quality and importance, while like other professions, teachers will also be able to get legal protection after the licences,” he said while participating in the ‘1st International Teachers’ Conference’ that kicked off at the Government Elementary College of Education in the Hussainabad area of Karachi on Friday.
The provincial minister said that the curriculum of Sindh had been compiled on the basis of inclusivity, life skills and pluralism, and a programme had been started to make the teachers’ training institutes across the province more active.
He said the draft to start the licensing of teachers in Sindh would be put before the cabinet after legal consultation. The objective of the conference was to provide an opportunity for healthy discussion and suggestions for further improvement in the teacher training sector.
On this occasion, it was also said that the provincial government was working on a plan to start a Master’s degree programme for teachers’ trainers in collaboration with the Oxford University and social organisation Durbeen, and in this regard consultation with all stakeholders had been started. Education Minister Shah said that the problem of a shortage of teachers in government schools had been solved, but there was a need to improve the quality and training of the newly recruited teachers.
He said that it is our duty to fulfil the responsibility of free education as per the constitution in a better way, but to achieve this we need the help of the civil society and other stakeholders. He complained that Sindh’s education policies were criticised a lot although it had outperformed other provinces in the field of education.
Shah thanked the representatives of the Oxford University and Durbeen and said the support and guidance in the Master’s degree programme for the teacher trainers would further improve this profession.
In a dialogue session during the conference, the need for training teachers according to modern methods was emphasised for the development of education. Three senior faculty members from the University of Oxford in London are visiting Pakistan to attend the 1st International Teacher Education Conference organised by Durbeen.
During their stay, Associate Professor of Science Education Dr Ann Childs, Associate Professor of English Education Dr Ian Thompson, and Lecturer of Comparative and International Education Dr Aliya Khalid will also visit government schools and teacher training colleges, and develop an understanding of the local education and policy context.
They will also finalise the programme and curriculum that is being developed for the first Master of Science (Education) for teacher educators in Pakistan.
Durbeen is addressing this issue by establishing a programme that offers an MS (Education) specifically for teacher educators. This is the first of its kind in Pakistan and is offered in very few universities around the world.
The objective is to train the teacher educators who can go on to become change agents in the teacher training colleges across Sindh and around Pakistan, leading to a downstream benefit in the quality of education offered at government schools around the country.
Durbeen is a non-profit organisation established with the goal of raising the quality of education in government schools across Pakistan by staffing them with professional teacher graduates of the revamped Government Colleges of Teacher Education.