Moalims

LAHORE - The Punjab government is considering reforming faculty development programme to run it on Public Private Partnership (PPP) basis.
A PPP project would mean private educational outfits would get the opportunity to train primary and elementary teachers in Punjab. Official sources told that initially a presentation will be given to the Punjab Chief Minister on the issue in the coming week.
An education secretariat officer revealed the Secretary Schools was not happy with the current performance of the training programme undertaken the Punjab government itself through the Directorate of Staff Development (DSD).
“The secretary wanted even after spending millions of rupees the quality of teachers could not be enhanced,” said the officer. To outsource the staff development facility was other option under consideration, the officer held.
If the CM agrees with the proposal, private sector operators of big chains of educational institutes could be engaged in the staff training programme, the sources said. The Punjab Group of Colleges, the City Schools and The Smart School are some of the private entrepreneurs believed to be interested in the job. No one from the companies was available to comment on the matter.
“There is a proposal that initially one school in each district will be handed over to each interested private party” said the official. After one year the progress of the party, the staff development and educational reforms to be studied, he added. The other proposal is the private owners to support the existing DSD mechanism to teach the public sector educators.
He said that the proponents of the PPP want that the expertise of the private schools owners be utilized in the public sector for the teachers’ capacity building. It is not yet clear whether the private partners will train the head teachers and the DTEs or the whole lot of the faculty.
There are about 30,000 schools being run by the Punjab government.
A government school senior teacher Muhammad Ali told “The Punjab government program to train the teachers through the DSD was delivering very well”. “There was no point in the proposal to outsource the good working public sector facility” the teacher added. He said that the government should improve the training mechanism in stead of doing experiments in the public sector educational educations”.
However, the World Bank Mission working in Pakistan said it was currently conducting an assessment of the current training schemes it funds and was looking to extend its support in the near future. It said “The World Bank will continue to work with DSD and the School Education Department with a focus on preparing teachers for multi-grade teaching, early childhood education, and improved classroom instruction”.
The email further said the World Bank supported the Government of Punjab in designing and implementing education sector reforms over the past decade through the Punjab Education Sector Reform Programs (I and II). The Bank has supported reforms to improve merit-based teacher recruitment, improve equity in teacher placement by supporting teacher re-deployment based on school needs, and reforms to improve the quality of teaching in the classroom by supporting the Directorate for Staff Development (DSD).
“The Bank will be conducting an Implementation Completion Review (ICR) of PESP II which will assess the performance of the project as a whole and among other things, specific sub-reform programs which include the continuous professional development of teachers”. Results from this ICR will most likely be available in December 2016.
A former public sector varsity Vice Chancellor Dr Akram Chaudhry praised the idea of involving the private sector, claiming it would raise standards. He said: “Without involving the private sector human resource for capacity building of public sector teachers it would be very hard to deliver in education field.”
The government lacks professional in every field and the education sector is not exception, said the scholar. He said that the need was to ensure strict monitoring of the foreign funded program otherwise funds would be wasted away.

News Reference