KP mulls legislation to make education compulsory for kids

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Government will introduce three bills of legislation for making education compulsory for every child of the province, regularizing private education institutions and recruitment of school-specific and non-transferable government teachers.

The Universities Model Act (UMA), presently under consideration of the Vice Chancellors, will be implemented by March 2016 to effectively administer activities of public sector universities of KP. Academic activities at newly established Women University, Mardan, will also commence from March 2016 to provide higher education facilities to female students from entire province in general and from Mardan, Charsada, Nowshera and Malakand districts in particular.

These decisions were taken in a meeting of Elementary and Secondary Education (E&SE) and Higher Education Department (HED), co-chaired by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Chairman Imran Khan and Chief Minister Pervez Khattak today.

The Provincial Minister for E&SE, Muhammad Atif, Special Assistant to the Chief Minister for HED, Mushtaq Ahmed Ghani, Chief Secretary KP Amjad Ali Khan, Additional Chief Secretary, Dr. Hamad Agha, Principal Secretary to the Chief minister, Dr. Shahzad Bangash, Secretaries of concerned departments and a team of Department of International Development (DFID), UK, led by its Islamabad based head, also attended the meeting.

The Chairman of the PTI, Imran Khan while highlighting the party’s guidelines for improving the education sector of KP, emphasized the need for advancement of the college and university level standard of education and asked the provincial government to take immediate and necessary steps for making the college level educational institutions fully autonomous and responsible as well.

He was of the view that since colleges were feeding universities, therefore, their standard must be raised to the optimum level and to achieve goal, principals of the colleges must also be made answerable, he suggested.

Imran Khan also stressed for strengthening of higher education department at strategic level to ensure that skills of graduates are highly employable and such visions should be fixed very clearly, he added. He said that present KP Gov. which came into power for the first time in the province must make difference in its performance comparing to the other two parties who had been in power for six times and could not show any remarkable performance.

Khan also proposed to showcase the implementation of “School Improvement Plans” in 64 schools by Rs. 33.29 million which were raised through donations, for further fund mobilization through social media.

Thanking DFID for helping KP gov. to improve the standard of education in the province, CM Pervez Khattak told on this occasion that the provincial government was making all required financial resources available for education sector and spending 29% of its budget for improving the state of education and it did not get even a single penny loan for this purpose. He informed that a comprehensive strategy was being followed seriously to ensure that there would be no primary school of less than six rooms and at least six teachers and in order to ensure all time availability of teachers, school based recruitment of teachers will be ensured and all other missing facilities will also be provided to all government schools, he added.

Khattak directed the HED to accelerate the progress on establishment of Chitral University and also ordered to provide transport facility to teaching staff of government colleges for pick and drop purpose within current month. He also directed to expedite the process of legislation for introducing further reforms in education sector.

Briefing the meeting on priorities, the progress and current status as well as timelines set for achieving the goals in E&SE and HED, Sahibzada Muhammad Saeed, head of the Strategic Support Unit of the Chief Minister’s Secretariat told that the Law department had vetted the draft legislation for making school education compulsory for all children in KP and it would be implemented by June 2016.

He further informed that merit would be established for school based recruitment of teachers and posting – transfers will be checked and availability of teachers will be ensured through another proposed law which had been sent to the Law department for vetting and it would be implemented by the next April.

The meeting was informed that vouchers were distributed under Education Vouchers Scheme to enroll 30,000 out of school children identified in six districts (Peshawar, Kohat, D.I.Khan, Mardan, Mansehra and Swat). The Secretary E&SE and Finance, Ali Raza Bhutta revealed that an amount of Rs. 9.8 billion had been released for providing missing facilities in 14692 government schools and provision of these facilities would be completed by 31 December.

The facilities included 8,147 boundary walls, 6,090 group latrines, 3,872 water connections, 775 electrification schemes, 4,821 additional class rooms and 405 solar panels, he enumerated, adding that the missing 4,981 boundary walls, 2,274 group latrines and 5,642 water connections in 8,740 schools will be completed by Sep 2016. It was further disclosed that fast-track standardization of 202 higher secondary schools in nine districts will be completed by the end of the next year while target had been fixed for Dec 2017 to complete standardization of another lot of 198 schools. The standardization envisaged improvement of infrastructure and learning environment, need based repairs, provision of missing facilities and additional class rooms.

The meeting also discussed impediments in procurement of furniture for 2,826 high schools of the province at a cost of Rs. 1.5 billion and the CM assured to intervene for removing such hurdles by convening a meeting in this respect soon. He also directed the C&W department to expedite technical survey and submit PC-1of standardization of 198 schools for approval of the provincial Development Working Party. He also expressed satisfaction over training and professional development program launched for the college teachers and directed to install biometric system in 50 colleges to improve governance and teachers attendance. He also offered to enhance seed money for already created Rs. one billion Endowment Fund for supporting KP domiciled MS, M. Phil and Ph.D. scholars and directed to disburse payments to the scholars enrolled in nine prestigious institutions of Pakistan and top 10 universities abroad.