Sardar asks students to enrol in BEd progammes like one run by Durbeen

Sindh Education Minister Syed Sardar Ali Shah on Wednesday visited Durbeen-managed Government Elementary College of Teacher Education (GECE), Hussainabad, for an award ceremony.

Education Secretary Akbar Laghari was also present on the occasion. Nine students who had secured a 3.6 GPA or higher were placed on the college’s Honours List and three high achievers received the Abdul Razzak Tabba Merit Award sponsored by Lucky Cement Chief Executive Officer Muhammad Ali Tabba.

In March 2019, the Sindh education department had outsourced the management of the college to Durbeen, a non-profit organisation striving to ensure that government schools in Sindh were staffed with rigorously trained teachers.

To achieve its goal, Durbeen has made significant progress over the past 2.5 years, which includes infrastructural and administrative reforms. The project also involves a unique partnership with the University of Helsinki, which helped redesign and update the BEd curricula at the start of the project.

To facilitate the Durbeen venture, the degree-awarding body, University of Karachi, granted the GECE Hussainabad the status of a pilot project and allowed it to develop a new BEd assessment system with certain quality control measures put in place by the university.

It is worth noting that Durbeen has not taken any funding from the government to date and has instead revamped the college as well as managed its operational expenses through its own fundraising efforts.

Furthermore, high quality of education at the GECE is provided to students completely free of charge so that passionate and talented students are incentivised to adopt the teaching profession.

Durbeen has now inducted three cohorts of young women who have the passion and talent to bring about change where it is most needed in government schools. Through its advocacy campaigns, Durbeen was also behind the government’s decision to remove the restriction on the age limit for students who wish to pursue BEd programmes.

Students graduating from the college will be placed in selected government schools for a period of three years. During the visit, the Sindh education minister recounted the first instance when Durbeen founder Shehzad Roy shared the vision of transforming the teachers training college into a world class institution to train government teachers in imparting high quality education in government schools .

He shared that most of the government teachers training colleges looked like ‘Bhoot Bangla’ (haunted house) and serious interventions are needed. Shah mentioned that he gave full support from the scratch to Roy so Sindh could have a prototype that could be replicated across.

Expressing his support for Durbeen, the education minister said he felt immense pride for the GECE that was running a cutting-edge programme with a stellar faculty to produce the next generation of educators for Pakistan. Shah praised the students for their academic achievement and made a plea to the wider body of students to enrol in the high quality BEd programmes such as the one at the GECE Hussainabad so that Sindh could have top-quality teachers.

The ceremony was followed by a tour of the campus and presentation on Durbeen’s plans to expand this reform initiative to other teacher education institutions of Sindh.