Outgoing academic year paints bleak picture

The current year has been quite disappointing for the education sector for a variety of reasons. Throughout the year, all the teachers’ associations and the clerks of the education department remained on the roads, seeking approval of their demands while the teaching system remained functional for only eight months due to last year’s Covid-19 scare.

Due to the lack of a proper teaching system, the results of grade IX and X examinations remained below average, prompting the imposition of an examination emergency. Meanwhile, the continuous political infighting for the past 10 months has also contributed to the destruction of the education system.

The number of street children was recorded at 200 million throughout Punjab. These children were forced to work in hotels, roadside stalls and workshops due to inflation and family pressures, leaving all the programmes to enrol them in education institutions ineffective.

Given the setbacks the education system faced this year, the academic year started on August 1 instead of April 4 and it will end only eight months later by March 31 while in terms of teaching the current academic year will last for just seven months from August 1 to February 28 as the annual examinations have been set for March.

The next academic year will start on April 1. According to a survey conducted by the ministry of education, around 107,000 posts of the teaching staff and 20,000 seats of the non-teaching staff are lying vacant in the public schools while as many as 2,469 public schools do not have permanent headmasters and 38,000 schools are deprived of the science labs.

As many as 27,000 village schools do not have proper boundary walls while 21,000 schools do not have computer lab facilities. At least 4,500 schools were upgraded from primary, middle and high school but unfortunately, additional teachers could not be provided for the upgraded sections in these schools. Sources said that the teaching system in the schools throughout the province is in shambles.

At least 102 million children are currently studying in 47,600 government schools while the dropout rate of the children from these schools remained at 20 per cent during the current year. The government introduced a single national curriculum from nursery to primary sections last year. However, due to the political unrest and the change in governments, the second phase of the SNC from grade VI to high school was dismissed.