PESHAWAR: The planning and development department has proposed to involve the private sector to set up and operate schools in the province with the government financing and regulating them.

The proposal will be put up to the chief minister for approval, a senior official of the P&D department told Dawn.

“We have discussed the proposal at different forums as well as with the education department and got a very positive response,” a senior official of the P&D department told Dawn.

The official said the government currently played the role of implementer and manager in the education system but the new approach wanted it to change its role of providing education.

Under the proposal, the government will hand over the role of educator to the private sector before assuming the ‘parental’ one.

“The new model will ensure the separation of the government’s two roles i.e. parent and educator. The government will adopt the parental role and give the educator’s to the private sector,” the draft proposal said.

The schools to be set up include all primary, secondary and higher secondary ones.

Govt to finance, regulate such schools, says proposal to be put up to CM for consent

Officials said the goal of providing quality education to the people couldn’t be achieved under the prevalent system as the people didn’t trust the quality of education at public sector schools.

They said the budget of the elementary and secondary education department was surging every year and had reached Rs140 billion but even then, the government schools had failed to perform well.

The officials said the private schools’ performance was much better.

They said the government’s approach to education sector didn’t deliver the goods as its schools were unable to compete with the private sector’s.

A survey of the education department said currently, over 1.8 million children were out of school in the province, while dropout rate stood at 44 per cent.

According to the P&D department’s proposal, the government has been spending around Rs3,000 per month on every student enrolled in government schools.

Also, the government is spending huge funds on setting up new schools, upgrading the existing ones and providing them with facilities.

The department proposed that as regulator, the government frame its standards for the establishment of different levels of schools and undertake standardisation/pre-qualification of different categories of private education network for school management.

Also, the government should pay for tuition fee, books, stationary, uniform, on-campus nutrition support and pocket money of the students by setting up an educational support fund to be replenished through government grants and non-governmental contribution and donations.

In its ‘parental’ role, the government should strictly monitor the implementation of approved standards of infrastructure and teaching and learning process and results.

Under this arrangement, the private education network will be asked to put up school buildings either through own funds or through engaging an investor from the market.

The government will pay back the amount invested by the private investor within a mutually agreed upon period along with a specific rate of return on investment made.

The P&D department said the proposed model would free school establishment and management from all kinds of processes, reduce workload of the relevant departments, and encourage quality seeding in education sector for creating an environment of competition with schools in public sector.

It added that the proposal’s execution would encourage the private sector to play a vibrant role in the education sector both on management and academic fronts.

The department also believed that the new model would ensure separation of the two roles of the government i.e. parent and educator.

“The government will adopt parental role and will give the role of the educator to the private sector,” said the proposal.

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2019