PEF allows school partners to admit children

LAHORE

Punjab Education Foundation (PEF) has allowed the elementary and secondary school partners associated with its public private partnership based New School Programme (NSP) to admit students in their primary section from the academic year 2016-17. 

According to a circular, the elementary and secondary level NSP partners can give admissions to the students in their primary section with certain conditions. Only one section will be allowed from nursery to grade-5 with the maximum ceiling of 35 students in one class, and only these students will be funded by the PEF. Only those students will be given admissions in the primary sections that have never been to schools and are falling in five to 16 year age bracket. In case of a dropout, the school leaving duration should not be less than one year and the school-leaving certificate of the previous school should also be provided for admission. 

The NSP school partners will provide a list of students to the foundation along with the affidavit that all the admissions have been made in accordance with the directions of the circular and in case of any violation, PEF is authorised to stop funding of primary section. These schools will also enter their students’ data in PEF’s Student Information System and changes would be incorporated every month to keep the record up-to-date. The circular further says that all the basic amenities including one teacher and classroom for every class, a wash room and clean drinking water facility for every 70 students along with necessary furniture would also be ensured. These schools would be further required to provide their record to the PEF monitors on demand. 

Meanwhile, according to a handout PEF increased the partnering school students’ monthly fee at Rs 100 per student since Oct 2015. In a circular, PEF directed the school partners to spend at least half of the additional income, earned from this increase, on salaries of their teachers. 

The circular states that the purpose of this initiative is to encourage the partnering school teachers to work with more zeal. It would also help in achieving better results in annually held Quality Assurance Test of the partner schools. This test is a good method of checking academic standards of the partner schools.