Public education: Teachers’ union calls for more protests

Boycott of grades five and eight examination duties on the cords.

LAHORE: The three-month tussle between the School Education Department and the Punjab Teachers' Union (PTU) over the constitution of district education authorities does not appear to have been resolved as yet. The latter have called for a series of protest demonstrations in the first week of January.

The PTU administrative council is expected to convene a meeting in the first week of January to discuss their upcoming protests and the possible boycott of examinations of grades five and eight, scheduled to be held in February.



This is the third time the PTU has threatened to boycott duties assigned by the government. Earlier, the PTU had threatened to boycott the enrolment campaign that began in August as well as polio and dengue campaigns. Thousands of teachers are assigned duties for the primary level and middle level examinations in the province.

The council meeting will be attended by presidents and general secretaries of the PTU’s divisional bodies. The meeting was announced after protest rallies scheduled in Rawalpindi and Lahore were cancelled in the wake of security threats. However, the PTU's divisional bodies continued to hold protest demonstrations in other parts of the province on December 23.

PTU General Secretary Rana Liaquat Ali Khan said the conflict could no longer be resolved through talks between the School Education Department  and the Punjab Teachers' Union. “The issue lies largely in the political leadership’s purview, not the bureaucracy,” he said. The DEAs would be formed under the Punjab Local Government Act 2013 and only political intervention could stop their formation, he added.

Khan said that the PTU had requested Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif to address the problem. “The political leadership needs to understand the concerns of the teachers' community…we cannot be browbeaten,” he said.



A PTU leader speaking on a condition of anonymity said that the earlier decision to boycott local election duties had been met with reservations from within the union. “There are a lot of challenges in this regard, primarily legal problems,” he said. “This is something a lot of union members do not want to engage in.”

Earlier in December, the PTU had announced that they might boycott examination and election duties if the government did not reconsider the formation of DEAs.

Khan says the Punjab Teachers' Union was currently only deliberating a boycott of examination duties across the Punjab. “Obviously this is not going to be a popular decision,” he said.

SED Deputy Secretary Mushtaq Sial who had earlier told The Express Tribune that the department was reaching out to the teachers' union to discuss the framework of the DEAs, said that was still the case. The department said it would take them another month before they could draw up a formal framework of the DEAs. Sial said channels of communication with the union members were open.

PTU's Khan, however, said that the department had not shared any details regarding the DEAs’ framework with them. He said the PTU feared that the department would form the DEAs in July without addressing their concerns.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 30^th, 2013.