Ranking system launched to evaluate educational institutions

Islamabad : As a part of its efforts to improve quality of education in the educational institutions, Federal Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (FBISE) has introduced ranking system to evaluate educational institutions performance.

This system will help sensitising parents about selection of best schools and colleges for their children along with creating a sense of competition among institutions in term of achieving excellence.

In an exclusive talk with this agency, FBISE Chairman Dr Ikram Ali Malik Wednesday said the federal board has placed the ranking of affiliated educational institutions working under 17 major and minor directorates across the country at its website. Major objective for this novel exercise in perspective of an educational board was to gauge the resources and learning environment in educational institutions affiliated with the federal board, he added.

Highlighting the objectives of ranking system, he said, it will critically analyse and identify gaps in core areas; promote intra-and-inter group academic competitiveness; develop authentic comprehensive database for prompt and efficient pre-and-post examination services. Dr Ikram further said ranking system of the schools would create an atmosphere of competition among the public and private educational institutions affiliated with FBISE across the country adding; this step will also ensure improvement of quality education and services in the schools.

He said the idea of this report has its roots back in periodic ranking of universities by the Higher Education Commission.

Sharing the details of ranking system, he said the ranking of the schools will be prepared on the basis of quality education, quality faculties, sports facilities, curriculum, and extra-curricular activities provided by them.

In this regard, the federal board in a survey has visited all the schools and collected the data including facilities, educational atmosphere and on the basis of this data their ranking has been developed, he told.

The objective of the survey is to develop a framework that helps set a benchmark for institutions affiliated with FBISE to follow and maintain minimum uniform threshold for various physical and human resources, learning environment, social interaction and societal contribution, he emphasized.

Sharing further objectives, he said it also helps set the baseline for the current resources and practices to motivate affiliated institutions to critically analyze and identify gaps in core areas that need improvement. The system will establish uniform standards to gauge the resources and learning environment of affiliated institutions to promote intra-and-inter group academic competitiveness to improve ignored qualitative aspects of education system, he opined.

Apart from examinations at Secondary School Certificate and Higher Secondary School Certificate levels, the board is responsible to ensure provision of requisite facilities and conducive academic and learning environment in the affiliated institutions, the chairman added.

Unfortunately, there is no such system of continuous reviewing, mapping, monitoring and evaluation of resources and learning environment against defined standards in core areas for overall improvement of educational system, he lamented.