PTI’s Education Emergency: 26,500 schools lack basic facilities

Negative governance indicators belie PTI claims

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) Education Emergency has failed to bring significant improvement in education in the province as 26,500 schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) still lack basic facilities of electricity, drinking water, boundary walls and lavatories.

According to official data of the provincial education department, currently around 10,000 government schools do not have electricity, 7,500 are without drinking water, 5,000 lack boundary walls and 4,000 have no washroom.

Some 159 schools have been closed in the province mostly for non-availability of teaching staff, revealed KP Minister for Education Atif Khan.

KP Assembly’s Standing Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education in a meeting held on 8 also expressed grave concern over non-operational educational institutions in the province and the posts of teachers lying vacant for a long time.

The committee meeting chaired by MPA Muhammad Arif noted that the closure of schools and lethargy in appointing new teachers on part of the government were tantamount to playing with the future of the children.

Apart from the closure of 159 schools, the KP government has virtually abandoned the much-trumpeted ‘Tameer School Programme’ as the PTI leadership could not launch an effective campaign in and outside the country for raising money to provide basic facilities to thousands of government schools.

An official of the education department said that the project was launched by the KP government to encourage affluent individuals to fund missing facilities in thousands of schools. But unfortunately, the PTI leadership focused more on other issues than on education, he added.

He said that the KP government was relying almost exclusively on donors for funding schools’ reconstruction and rehabilitation, provision of furniture and girls’ stipends programmes. It had allocated a little more than Rs 4 billion for schools’ reconstruction and rehabilitation.

When questioned about the uniform school syllabus in KP, he disclosed that textbooks of around 15 publishers were being taught in private schools contrary to the government’s repeated claims of bringing uniformity in the education system.

He said that though the government had changed the medium of instruction from Urdu to English in government schools from grade-1 in the ongoing academic year but the teaching material in the textbooks was not uniform.

A professor of Education at Peshawar University said about the uniform education system, “Education would only be uniformed when the textbooks, teaching methodologies and facilities at the private and government schools are the same.”

An education department official said that the PTI Chief Imran Khan’s dream of introducing a uniform curriculum in all schools in the province remains a distant reality. Until and unless the qualified teachers are inducted the syllabus of private schools could not be taught in government institutes.

JUI-F Provincial Secretary Information Abdul Jalil Jan said about the situation that no visible improvement had been witnessed in any sector including education in the province, adding that not a single project of significance was launched by the PTI government for promotion of education since the Education Emergency project.

He said that PTI government had been claiming for a long time that it would improve the education sector by spending huge portion of budget on education but in reality the KP government reduced its allocation for the education sector to 27.47 per cent in 2014-15 from 28.03 per cent in 2013-14.

According to a recent report of PILDAT, despite tall claims of the PTI chairman about good governance, the party had failed to deliver in KP.

The KP government had not been able to register the same level of positive indicators attained by the Punjab government and most of the governance indicators remained negative in the province, the report said.

It said KP’s provincial government scored the highest negative NPRs on disaster preparedness and management, ­45 per cent; anti-corruption, ­43 per cent; education, ­42 per cent; quality and independence of civil service, ­42 per cent; merit-based recruitment and promotions, ­41 per cent; environmental sustainability, ­40 per cent; healthcare, ­38 per cent; tax collection, ­38 per cent; energy production and management, ­37 per cent; investment friendliness, ­37 per cent and transparent and efficient public procurement, ­35 per cent.

Similarly, on 3 out of the 27 indicators, the KP government scored negative ratings: law and order, -8 per cent; management of unemployment, -8 per cent and safe drinking water supply, -5 per cent,” the report said.