June 6, 2003	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 5, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, June 5: The World Bank has approved a $3.63 million credit to support the implementation of a National Education Assessment System (NEAS) in Pakistan.

The credit, a technical assistance loan, supports the government’s ongoing Education Sector Reform (ESR), which was launched by the government in 2001 as a part of its reform agenda.

The World Bank in an announcement on Tuesday said that the ESR provides a solid basis for decisions concern in resource allocation within the education sector. The $3.63 million credit, from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s concessionary lending arm, have a 35-year maturity with a 10-year grace period and a 0.75 per cent service charge.

The NEAS will provide guidance to teachers and their supervisors about the substantive areas that need to be emphasized within the curriculum. It will also provide household with a much better basis for gauging the value of the education being provided to their children.

Consequently, as the system takes hold, appropriate use of the data it generates would result in a better quality of education for Pakistani children.

The education ministry has testing mechanisms for assessing individual student performance, but until now it had no system of measuring how well schools were doing in implementing the curriculum and learning objectives associated with it.

The project will be implemented over a period of five years under the coordination of the curriculum wing of the ministry of education, which will oversee and monitor the implementation of the NEAS activities throughout the country and disseminate its results.