Atif irked by poor performance of govt schools

Convenes meeting of board chairmen, education department analysing results of all boards

PESHAWAR: Irked by the poor performance of government-run schools in the province in Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examinations, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) Minister for Elementary and Secondary Education Minister Atif Khan has called an emergency meeting of the chairmen of the eight education boards for Monday.

The meeting, confirmed by K-P Education Media Advisor Najiullah Khattak on Saturday, is expected to discuss the poor results obtained by students of government schools in the recently-held SSC examinations.



The eight education boards of the province announced their annual SSC results recently. However, no student from government-run schools made it to the list of top 20 students.

On the one hand, the K-P government has claimed record improvement in government schools, but on the other, the SSC results were a damning report card on the performance of these schools.

Curiously, students from government schools appearing in all the boards including Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) Mardan, Peshawar, Swat, Bannu, Abbottabad, Dera Ismail Khan and Kohat was declared as zero per cent – meaning all of the students from the schools who appeared for the exams, failed.

Khattak said that the education minister, while summoning a meeting of the chairmen, has also ordered to compile their respective results subject-wise to analyse problem areas.

Moreover, the media adviser said that the minister would check the result school-wise and will subsequently demand an explanation from the heads of each of the low-performing schools.

He added that action would take against those teachers whose performance was poor, but teachers who delivered a good result would be awarded.



Separately, a statement issued by the education department on Saturday stated that they were in the process of analysing results of SSC exams. These results, the department said, would be viewed in the context of results from the past five to ascertain the impact of various reforms undertaken by the government.

Moreover, a comparison of results obtained by the public sector and private sector schools would be made to see the success rate of students in the two systems.

The department claimed that while considerable improvement in numbers of public school students securing top 20 positions and good grades in exams conducted by all the boards had been observed, there were still a number of schools who had very poor results.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 9^th, 2017.