Punjab School Education Minister Rana Mashhood Ahmad Khan has said that the Punjab Govt. has provided record funds for education promotion since 2008. During the last eight years the school education budget has been enhanced 400 times while the educational budget of school education department has been enhanced from Rs 62 billion to Rs 315 billion. He announced that a three month long examergency has been announced in the province for getting better results he added that students would be given additional lectures to show better performance in the exams. Punjab has made model education province under the vision of Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and time is not far when the world will follow our education policies. This is the gist of his press conference which held at Punjab Curriculum & Textbook Board on Saturday.
Rana Mashhood briefed media men about different educational reforms introduced by Punjab Govt to improve the quality of education as well as to extend education to the children of impecunious strata. He said that provision of education to all the children is our strong commitment and no child will be deprived of his basic right. This will enlighten every house with knowledge and the whole country will benefit of our policies. He said that a complaint cell is being setup in the Punjab to solve the issues of the people pertaining to school education department. Similarly, the educational models of Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and other countries would be studied to raise the standard of school education according to international level. He vowed that the teachers will be given a respectable position in the society. Because our teachers are change agents in the 21th century in this regard, besides up gradation of teacher’s scales, teacher’s foundation would also be established to help them in different matters including provision of soft loans.
The provincial Minister said that a comprehensive program of schools improvement has been launched with an amount of Rs 50 billion. According to this program, construction of 36 thousand new classrooms and the provision of missing facilities, besides restoration of dilapidated school buildings would be done by 2018. It is good to know that the total ratio of provision of missing school facilities including boundary walls, toilets, electricity, clean drinking water and classroom furniture has increased from 69 percent to 95 percent. A total of Rs 30 billion has been spent on the provision of these facilities. The minister announced that five to nine year old every child will be in schools by 2018.
The School Education Minister said that early childhood education rooms as well as qualified teachers will be provided in 10 thousand primary schools by March 2018. In now, ECE classrooms have been developed in 1225 primary schools in different districts of the province. This would help to achieve 100 percent enrolment. He said that pre nursery classes would be started soon to ensure 100 percent enrolment and to decrease dropout. On the other side, students would be provided one time balanced meal in their schools in four selected districts of southern Punjab under School Feeding Program. The Govt has also increase the monthly stipend of girls from Rs 200 to Rs 1000 enrolled in secondary levels schools in 11 southern Punjab districts to encourage girls education in these backward areas. A total of four lac girls will benefit from this program.
Rana Mashhood Ahmad Khan said that Punjab is the only province where students are being taught on tablet computers. Under this project the smart digital boards, IT labs, and tablets have been provided in multimedia classrooms and it is hope that these gadgets would involve the students further in their studies besides improving their intellectual ken. Tablets and smart boards are being provided to 2000 schools under this pilot project. He told that the Govt has eliminated child labor form brick kilns and children of brick kiln families are being provide with stipends to continue their education. He expressed satisfaction that student’s attendance ratio has been increased to 90 percent while teacher attendance has been enhanced to 93 percent. Similarly tours ratio of school monitoring staff has been increased to 96 percent.