Teachers unhappy over govt’s privatisation plans

LAHORE: Public schoolteachers in the province are not happy with the government’s announcement to outsource schools to the private sector. They said outsourcing as many as 10,000 of them was unacceptable.

In a statement, Punjab Teachers’ Union (PTU) Central General Secretary Rana Liaquat Ali said outsourcing 10,000 schools was an unwise move. Calling it another experiment with the education system, he said that progress could only be made through understanding ground realities. He said that there was a need to take teachers onboard in the decision making process to reform the sector. He urged the government not to destroy the education sector through experimentation.



Rana Liaquat Ali alleged the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), the government body through which the outsourcing was proposed, had been showing off its performance through fabricated statistics. He added private school owners had been enrolling three-year olds to show higher enrolments, which was a serious violation of the rules. “The School Education Department (SED) and teachers should work out the problems collectively otherwise local and international advisors will destroy the education system of the province,” he said.

“We demand the chief minister get rid of these local and foreign education advisors who are unaware of the ground realities. It is because of them that education sector has been on a decline for the past nine years,” Rana Liaquat said. He added that the PTU was against any experiment to outsource 10,000 more schools, adding teachers would protest against the move.

The reaction came after CM Shehbaz Sharif, during a high-level meeting to review progress on Punjab Schools Reforms Roadmap, said he believed that outsourcing produced good results. A plan was subsequently devised to outsource 10,000 more schools.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 6^th, 2017.