100% enrolment: Teacher shortage, poor infrastructure big obstacles

There are six teachers for 450 students at Jandiala Government Girls Middle School.

LAHORE:

As the Punjab government’s enrolment drive enters its third week, many teachers are questioning its efficacy. They say schools lack teachers and infrastructure. 

The drive commenced on August 14 and aimed to ensure 100 per cent school enrolment of 3.5 million children. As many as 30,000 government teachers are participating in the drive.

Parents’ response to the government’s interest in the enrolment drive appeared to be positive so far, primary school teacher Razia Khan told The Express Tribune. However she said the government should have also made an effort to provide necessary resources for improving the schools’ infrastructure. “Most people want to send their kids to school... but there just aren’t enough schools or teachers,” she says.

Khan has been teaching Urdu and Islamiyat to grades 3, 4 and 5 at a government elementary school in Lahore since 2006. She says there are 1,200 children enrolled in the school. They are taught in two shifts because of the limited space. “Four to six children are being enrolled at our school every day,” Khan said, “There are already 40 to 45 children in each class.”

While Khan’s school has 34 teachers employed full time, the Jandiala Government Girls Middle School has six teachers for 450 children. The school has six classrooms and there are 65 to 85 children enrolled in grades 1, 2 and 3, Khan said. These figures are in line with the statistics provided by the School Census 2012 conducted by the School Education Department.

The school’s teacher to student ratio is 1:75. According to the school’s in-charge, Farhat Noureen, 25 new students have been enrolled since the drive began two weeks ago. At this rate, there will be 150 more students at the school by the time the drive ends in October, Noureen says, there will then be just six teachers for 600 children at the school.

The Government Primary School Chakh Bharath near Bao Wala in Lahore has recently enrolled 40 children as part of the drive. The school has four rooms and 400 students with only seven teachers. While enrolment figures might seem encouraging, teachers are worried about the students’ learning outcomes.

“How can we accommodate so many children in four rooms?” Maqbool Ahmad, a teacher, asks. The teachers have to go out to work on the drive and the students are neglected. “We are tired of managing schools without resources,” Ahmad said, “We are victimised if we complain.”

According to the Punjab Teachers Union, as many as 200 teachers have been terminated for their students’ poor results in the secondary school examinations this year. 4,000 teachers have been penalised by retracting their annual increments for up to five years and 1,500 teachers have been served show cause notices.

However, at a meeting of the Punjab Teachers Union and the School Education Department on Monday, Schools Secretary Abdul Jabbar Shaheen directed all education district officers to exonerate the teachers who had been terminated. The penalty of witholding increments will also be lifted.

According to the Punjab Schools Census, 10 million children are enrolled in as many as 57,000 schools in the province. There were more than 28,000 schools for boys, 26,000 for girls, and 3,000 co-educational schools. The census states that there are almost 331,388 teachers across the province- 165,284 of them men and 166,104 women. There are 658 primary, 214 middle and 324 high schools in Lahore, the census report states.

SED Planning and Budget Deputy Secretary Qaiser Rasheed has said that providing missing facilities to the schools was a ‘prioritised’ objective for the year. He said poor facilities resulted in poor retention of students in schools. The SED plans to spend Rs7.5 billion in 2013-2014 to provide missing facilities, including drinking water, electricity, boundary walls and toilets in schools in as many as 2,500 government primary and elementary schools. Punjab Teachers Union General Secretary Rana Liaquat Ali says that the government should have provided the infrastructure before the enrolment drive began. “Where will the teachers teach the newly enrolled children...where will the children sit?” He asked.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 28^th, 2013.