School enrolment drive launched

LAHORE:Punjab School Education Minister Dr Murad Raas on Monday announced launching of School Enrolment Drive with particular focus on students dropped out during the prolonged closures of schools twice in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic.

Addressing a press conference, the minister said that instead of engaging schoolteachers in the enrolment drive, school councils would be involved to engage with the local community to send their kids to schools who either dropped out from the schools during the recent closures or the already out-of-school children (OOSC) across the province. Dr Murad Raas said that the enrolment drive would be continued throughout the year and the department had set a target of bringing back one million children to government schools. He said a Taleem Champion competition was part of the enrolment drive to engage school councils and create a sense of competition among the councils. He said CEOs, AEOs and Deputy Education Officers and school councils had been assigned targets in this regard and the department would strive to bring more than one million children back to schools.

The minister said that the government wanted to facilitate schoolteachers maximum so that they could focus on their primary duty of teaching; therefore, the entire transfer mechanism system was shifted online and similarly mechanism for leave and retirement had also been made online. He said the department was now working on transferring the ACR and promotions related task online.

To a question, Dr Murad Raas said that the provincial government had also worked on legislation related to private schools’ fee and other issues and the same had been forwarded to the Law Department and then it would be sent to the provincial cabinet for final approval.

Answering another question, the minister said that School Education Department (SED) Punjab never collected Form-B from the students and in order to maintain record of the students the public schools on the directions of SED Punjab collected Form-B of 86 percent of students enrolled in the schools and added the remaining forms would be collected soon. He said one-month extension had been allowed for schools to collect remaining Form-B from students.

He said there were 120,000 private and public schools in Punjab and the department did not have field force to monitor every school and added however it was possible with the

support of media and community.

He said that the people should inform the department in case schools were not following COVID-19 related SOPs. He added that parents should also be careful as well and send kids wearing face masks and sensitizing them about maintaining social distances etc in schools.