Labour Dept to give free education to workers’ children

The Labour & Human Resource Department will provide free educational facilities to 28,000 workers’ children.

LAHORE: The Labour & Human Resource Department will provide free educational facilities to 28,000 workers’ children through 38 Workers’ Welfare Schools situated in 19 districts of the province. It also plans to provide free education to the workers’ children through partner schools in six more districts where workers’ schools are not available.

Deserving students will be accommodated in institutions near their homes. The dues will be paid to the schools by the Labour Department. A total cost of Rs900 million has been estimated for this project.

The Labour & Human Resource minister, Muhammad Ashraf Khan Sohna visited the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF) on Wednesday. PEF managing director Mohyuddin Ahmad Wani briefed the labour minister about the PEF’s model of public-private partnership for providing free education to the poor students. He said that the foundation’s administrative and financial autonomy had helped them to develop a firm system of monitoring and evaluation. “Besides this, biannual quality assurance tests help maintain meaningful checks on the students’ academic standards. Keeping in view the success of Education Voucher Scheme (EVS) in the city’s slums, we plan to increase the total number of students to 40,000,” he added. The number of EVS partner schools will also be increased to 200 during 2010-2011.

Sohna said that six participating schools would grant secondary education leading to the Matric-tech certificate in the first phase. Students will also be offered various technical courses, which will help build trained manpower for the industrial sector, he said.

PEF MD said that two professors from the Harvard University, USA, have offered to re-design the EVS to make it more effective.

He said that the foundation had identified the NGOs that will help reactivate 1,006 non-functional schools. He offered to help the Labour Department in capacity-building and in monitoring and evaluation of its education projects.

The minister and PEF agreed to enhance cooperation to give marginalised families education opportunites.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 2^nd, 2010.