Minister of Education Rana Mashhood Ahmed Khan chaired a meeting to review education reforms in the province. The meeting was attended by DCOs, EDOs and key officials of the Schools Education Department and affiliated agencies. The meeting was the first in a series of consultative meetings to be held with different stakeholders to get input into the future of education reforms in government schools across the province.
While addressing the participants, Rana Mashhood reiterated that with more than 50,000 government schools, over 400,000 teachers and almost 11 million children enrolled Punjab’s School system is the largest of its kind in the world and presents a unique challenge of scale and complexity. Since the Punjab government launched its schools reforms program in 2010, the system has seen substantial progress in particular in terms of student and teacher attendance rates improving significantly as well as improvement of facilities. However, a lot of work remains to be done, particularly on education quality.
Secretary Schools Education Abdul Jabbar Shaheen and Special Secretary Schools Education Department Syed Gulzar Hussain Shah outlined the department’s plan for quality improvement by improving teaching quality and learning, strengthening governance, improving the learning environment and upgrade school building infrastructure. He stated that a comprehensive and ambitious reform programme on quality was going to be put in place and launched by the Chief Minister, coinciding with the overall strategy and provided constructive input. Several operational questions and challenges were raised in the meeting which the schools Education Department will work on and address before the revised reform programme is launched.
Secretary Schools Education Department requested all present DCOs and EDOs to provide their personal leadership to this effort, because transforming the quality of education at such a large scale was going to be significant challenge, however, one that needed to be met and done so with speed. Project Director of Programme Monitoring and Implementation Unit (PMIU), Asim Iqbal expressed his support and commitment to help deliver the reform efforts by monitoring the progress on learning independently through his monitoring and devaluation assistants. Similar support was expressed by the Programme Director of the Directorate of Staff Development (DSD) and other stakeholders.
