School reforms: K-P govt spent Rs36 billion over five years

Funds helped plug key gaps in schools including provision of furniture, water, power

PESHAWAR: With fewer facilities pushing children away from schools, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government has over the past five years sunk millions of rupees in providing key facilities to students.

The Pakistan-Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) led government has claimed that since 2013, it has invested over Rs36 billion in providing basic facilities at government schools.

According to documents available to The Express Tribune, as much as Rs29 billion has been invested in providing facilities such as electricity, water, toilets, additional classrooms, boundary walls and installation of solar panels.



The documents showed that there were just 10,770 public schools in the province which had such facilities. However, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) government’s reforms — implemented with the help of its developmental partners — had helped provide these facilities at 73,418 schools in the province.

One such initiative was the conditional grant programmes called ‘the better school initiatives’.

The initiative found that most government schools across the province did not have any facilities for drinking water and were without electricity, boundary walls or latrines.

The government claimed that once these facilities were provided, enrollment in government schools improved in addition to restoring parents’ confidence in these schools.

The documents showed that all such conditional grant schemes involved local government representatives, teachers and parents. Moreover, for the first time in the history of K-P, the communities were empowered to spend government funds on their local schools.

The quality of construction work — to build additional classrooms and boundary walls — was monitored using third-party monitoring systems.

The government pointed to the migration of students from private to public schools as a strong indicator of the improvement in the quality of public schools in the province with 151,000 private school students moving to government-run schools over the past two years, the documents claimed.

It further claimed that currently, 94 per cent of the schools in the province have boundary walls — a move which the government hoped would make a big impact in getting more children, particularly young girls, into schools.

“Parents have a greater comfort level when sending their daughters to school in K-P when they know that they are equipped with essential facilities and students learn best on chairs and tables with good lumbar support,” the documents read.

It further showed that the incumbent government has spent over Rs7 billion on providing furniture to government schools. In this regard, it pointed out that in 2013, most schools across the province had no furniture or it was sub-standard. But with the provision of the furniture, 1.4 million children now sit on chairs at schools, instead of the cold, hard floor.

K-P Elementary and Secondary Education Media Advisor Najiullah Khattak told The Express Tribune that most schools in the province lacked basic facilities, which had helped boost parent’s confidence about government schools.

“Previously, without basic facilities in school, students did not take an interest in schools and they were either absent from schools or did not go to schools,” he shared.



But with the provision of facilities, Khattak said that parents were keen on sending their children to government schools and some had shifted their children from private to government schools.

He added that work on the better schools initiative project had been accelerated with the aim of fulfilling the needs of all government schools across the province.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 28^th, 2017.