Govt to hire ‘part-time coaches’ in schools
Education Minister Shafqat Mehmood interacts with teachers and students at a school in Islamabad on the first day of the reopening of educational institutions. PHOTO: NNI
The Punjab Ministry of Education has given permission to recruit daily-wage teachers part-time coaches (PTCs) to fill the shortage of teachers in schools.
The PTCs will be hired for Murree and Kotli Sattian tehsil of Rawalpindi, Rahim Yar Khan, Rajanpur, Dera Ghazi Khan, Bahawalpur, Bhakkar and Mianwali.
The main objective of hiring part-time coaches is to support the enrolment drive especially for achieving 100 per cent enrolment of children aged 5 to 9 years as well as to fill the gap of non-availability of teachers especially in the subjects of English, Urdu, Science and Mathematics.
These recruitments will be made for the ongoing education season with a fixed pay for two months only. School councils have been authorized to make these recruitments.
The salaries of these temporary part-time coaches will be paid from each non-salary budget account.
At present, there are a total of 449,962 approved teacher seats in 53,000 government schools across Punjab including in Rawalpindi and of them, 95,192 teacher seats have been lying vacant for the last five years.
Teachers’ union leaders Shafiq Bhalwalia and Basharat Iqbal Raja said that “recruitment of daily wage and temporary teachers is a cruel act. It is a joke with the teachers. In order to improve the education system and increase the literacy rate, regular recruitment should be done against all vacant seats. They said that this will also provide employment to the educated youth. “We reject these temporary recruitments,” they said.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 21st, 2022.