Recruitment for 6,000 single-teacher schools approved

LAHORE
An amount of Rs 14 billion will be utilised by school councils of public sector schools across Punjab during the new fiscal year 2015-16 while SNEs have been approved vis-à-vis recruitment of teachers for around 6,000 single-teacher schools.
This was disclosed by officials of School Education Department (SED) Punjab while speaking at a post budget seminar on Budgetary Allocations of School Education Department (2015-16) at a local hotel here on Friday.
The seminar was organised by SED in collaboration with Pakistan Girls Education Initiative (PGEI) Punjab and Unicef. A number of parliamentarians including Chairman of Punjab Assembly’s Standing Committee on Education Engr Qamar ul Islam Raja, SED’s additional secretaries including Mirza Mahmoodul Hassan and Ahmad Ali Kamboh, programme director Directorate of Staff Development (DSD) Ehsan Bhuta, SED deputy secretary Qaiser Rashid and deputy secretary from PMIU Rana Ubaid Ullah and members of civil society and NGOs attended the event. A parliamentarian came hard on the SED for allocating a huge amount to schools councils saying there was no mechanism in place to monitor utilisation of the funds by the school councils as basic facilities were still lacking in thousands of schools.
A civil society member criticised the government for its priorities saying a huge amount was spent on construction of Daanish schools but one of the schools collapsed just after a year in district Attock. It was also informed that the schools department had planned to provide solar power to around 5,000 off-grid schools in different parts of Punjab. The speakers also talked about public private partnership (PPP) model of Punjab Education Foundation for opening of new schools in the province claiming that it was not only cost effective but also result oriented.
Teachers’ associations in Punjab have started raising concerns over the PEF’s public private model on the grounds that the government should invest in its own schools instead of spending money on schools of private sector.
In his presentation Mirza Mahmood ul Hassan said Rs 8.5 billion had been allocated for construction, repair of dangerous buildings of public schools in Punjab in the current budget.