Education budget: Report questions spending priorities

"As many as 150 ghost schools in the district of DG Khan had been detected," says Dr Asma Mamdot.

LAHORE:

“What are the ‘Centres of Excellence’ mentioned in the Danish Schools and Centres of Excellence Authority Act 2010?,” asked Ahmad Ali, a research fellow at Institute of Social and Policy Sciences (ISAPS), here on Friday.

Ali was presenting an ISAPS report on education in the province at a post-budget policy dialogue on the ‘Effectiveness of Education Financing for 2012-13 organised in collaboration with the British government’s Department for International Development (DFID).

Ali said the government had allocated Rs2 billion for Danish schools but there was a need for transparency on how the money was being spent. “The effectiveness of spending at Danish schools must be re-evaluated,” he said.

Ali also pointed out that while the budget allocation for school education had increased that for higher education and special education had decreased over last year. “While the government must focus on primary education, the importance of higher education cannot be discounted. Quality teachers are a product of quality higher education,” Ali said.

He said as many as 2,000 schools had been destroyed in floods. Ali said an estimated Rs2 billion was required to rehabilitate these schools. He said the government had allocated only Rs500 million in the budget for 2012-13.

Quoting the assessment, Ali said as many as 9% of public schools did not have toilets. He said around 400,000 people were working in various capacities in the education sector.

He said the 2011 Punjab Education Assessment System (PEAS) for Grade 4 students, had discovered that 73 per cent of students showed weak performance in mathematics, 76 per cent in social studies and 87 per cent in Urdu. “Are the children learning? Our assessment is they are not,” said Ali.

He said 4.4 million children in the 5 to 9 age group and 9.6 million children in the 5 to 16 age group are out of school. “To fulfill the promise of free and compulsory education, the government needs to establish 65,000 more schools over the next 15 years,” he said.

He said another 263,184 new classrooms and 144,000 new teachers would be required. Ali said while the government had allocated Rs15 billion for development works in school education this year, it had only released Rs16 million since June. He said it was important to assess the impact of the delay in releasing funds.

The ISAPS report said that the government had allocated Rs100 million for the Army Public School and College, Rawalpindi, and another Rs12.8 million for the PakTurk International Schools and Colleges (PTISC) for school construction under a miscellaneous grant. He said the fund was orignally meant for curricular activities.

Qaiser Rasheed, the schools deputy secretary, agreed learning outcomes at terminal classes (grade 5 and grade 8) were a good indicator of effectiveness. He said the government had not closed any schools but some schools with low resources in rural areas had been merged. Regarding the fund allocated to the Army Public School and the PTISC, Rasheed said that the government had received assurances that 10 per cent and 20 per cent of students enrolled in the schools would be from marginalised sections of society. “The funding for the PakTurk schools was also a goodwill gesture in keeping with the foreign policy,” he said.

Mian Imran Masood, a former education minister, said the government’s tend to re-allocate money to favoured schemes despite allocating them at the budget stage to other schemes. “This increases as elections get closer,” he said.

Dr Asma Mamdot, a member of the standing committee on education, said the provision of education in the country was in bad shape. She said as many as 150 ghost schools in the district of DG Khan had been detected.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 29^th, 2012.