Education emergency in Sindh

Despite shoddy infrastructure of schools, the annual development programme budget is not being utilised in full

Instead of declaring an education emergency, the Government of Sindh has taken administrative initiatives to bifurcate the Education and Literacy Department into two, schools and colleges education, similar to the education administration in Punjab. Moreover, two monitoring committees, one comprises Mukhtiarkars, assistant commissioners, and deputy commissioners and the other one that includes MPAs, chairman, and deputy commissioner has been announced. They will check performance and progress of schools in their respective constituencies. And these steps are called education emergency. Given the track record of unfulfilled commitments and progress at a snail’s pace, the general public appears to be skeptical about these apparent better decisions.

However, it would have been better if the Government of Sindh had declared an education emergency with a few clear priorities, together with timelines. Since no other province in Pakistan has ever seen an education emergency, there is a lot of confusion around it in public. In order to understand legal technicalities involved in the matter, I spoke with the Advocate General of Sindh, Barrister Zamir Ghumro, and advocate Javed Kazi. According to them, an education emergency may not be equivalent to the emergency in which constitution is held in abeyance. Here nothing of the sort will happen; only Essential Services Act of 1958 may be evoked whereby all teachers, students and other education department employees will be inhibited from boycotting classes or going on strike. However, employees’ rights mentioned in the Sindh Civil Servants Act of 1973 may be suspended but not those ones which are enshrined in the constitution. Furthermore, Barrister Zamir said that since there are other ways to handle employees’ union or other similar challenges, an education emergency has been put on hold for the time being.

But controlling employees is just one aspect of the emergency, what else needs to be done to address chronic educational challenges in the province? Before we answer this question, let’s have a quick look at the performance of education sector against key indicators. Quality of education mainly comprises three key component parts: teachers, curriculum and textbooks, and infrastructure. A quality and performance of teachers can be gauged from students’ achievements. The Government of Sindh has been commissioning a third party to conduct a research study to find out student’s learning outcome for the last three years. The Standardised Achievement Test (SAT) is administered to all students enrolled in Government Schools in classes five and eight. Students are assessed on three subject languages (English, Urdu and Sindhi), maths and science. The average score of students in three subjects is merely 22 per cent which is far below the expectations. Interestingly, a majority of teachers in the province are professionally qualified which means that they have degrees like Bachelors and Master’s in Education, Certificates in Teaching, etc. The Secretary of Education believes that more than 60 per cent teachers are untrainable. So, how to deal with poor quality of teachers? A quick fix could be an announcement of golden handshake policy, and those teachers who wish to continue should be asked to qualify again through an examination.



With regard to infrastructure, let alone missing facilities, out of 46,039, approximately 35 thousand schools are one or two classroom schools, of them around 15 per cent are without buildings, 37 per cent need repair while 13 per cent schools’ buildings are considered dangerous. These schools even don’t fit the basic definition of school. So, appropriate infrastructure equipped with basic facilities is prerequisite for student’s retention in school and attracting out of school children to schools. Some genuine efforts are underway to improve school infrastructure in Sindh, in collaboration with USAID. The Government of Sindh is building 120 modern schools in the province. Building design and quality of work is quite impressive. Apart from that, the education department is implementing a school consolidation policy under which 4095 schools has been merged into 1350 campus schools. One time grant worth Rs1.8 billion has been earmarked for improving the overall condition of the campus schools. However, timely and impact oriented budget utilisation is still a challenge. Such efforts should be scaled up to establish at least one modern school at union council level. And a short course should be organised for all teachers in the evening to learn English and computer skills as it will broaden their horizon and connect them to the world. Special efforts should be made for maximum participation of female teachers.

Furthermore, despite shoddy infrastructure of schools, the annual development programme (ADP) budget is not being utilised in full. Therefore, the government should take stock of the situation looking at evidences of bottlenecks and leakages in the system and then rules and procedures vis-a-vis budget-making, its releasing and utilising should be amended accordingly. For effective delivery of services, financial and administrative powers in line with a principle of subsidiarity may be devolved to the local leaders along with a strong mechanism of accountability. During the emergency, three priorities in the context of quality education must be accomplished; quality human resource including competent and motivated teachers, infrastructure and modern curriculum and textbooks along with assessment system. With these basic measures, the education department can be turned around. So, are we prepared to create a new history in Sindh?

Published in The Express Tribune, September 24^th, 2016.

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