Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa schools pass all Class 1 to 8 students

As per the policy, no student could be declared failed

PESHAWAR:

All the public sector schools in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) have announced the results of annual exams from class one to class eight. As per the policy all the students have been declared successful.

The policy to move all the students to the next class after annual exams was introduced by the Awami National Party (ANP)-led coalition government ‘to discourage’ the trend of students dropping out. The policy is still in vogue.

“From class 1 to class 5 all students were passed by obtaining just five to eight per cent marks while the class 6 to class 8 students were passed on just 15 to 18 per cent marks as against the traditional benchmark of 33 per cent,” an official of education department told The Express Tribune.

“For the past 16 years we are following a policy under which you simply cannot fail any student. It was introduced on the realisation that students who don’t pass their annul exams feel discouraged, and so do their parents, and they just drop out of the school,” he said, adding that the policy has invited heavy criticism from headmasters of high schools.

“High schools often complain that they are enrolling students in class six who can’t write their own names. But this policy was introduced by the ANP government ‘to increase literacy rate’,” he said.

Teachers are against this policy from the day one but they had no say in the policymaking which was formulated behind closed doors by ministers and bureaucrats and then introduced without the consent of all stakeholders, he added.

There is a government policy that high schools will enroll all the students coming from primary schools without any qualification tests. The school teachers are of the opinion that such students often prove to be a burden for them.

“This policy should be rolled back because it was tried and tested in the past 16 years and clearly it didn’t work,” said the official, adding that government should reintroduce board exams for class 5 and 8.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 2^nd, 2022.