LAHORE, April 26: The Punjab government has planned to allocate funds and human resources to respective schools according to their enrolment ratio during the next financial year.

This initiative will help bring out-of-school children back to schools, claimed Punjab School Education Department’s additional secretary Malik Mukhtar Noul.

Punjab Assembly Standing Committee on Education chairman Chaudhry Javed Ahmad said the Punjab government would increase the development budget of the school education department from this year’s Rs14 billion to Rs19 billion in the next fiscal.

To bring the out-of-school children to schools, he said, campuses of public sector schools should be utilised at their optimum level by launching flexible schooling to offer crash courses for out-of-school children and then mainstream them after an examination. “The Punjab government will begin this project even as a pilot project this year,” he said.

They were speaking at a policy dialogue on “Out-of-School Children in Punjab -- Looking at Access and Equity” organised by Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi at a local hotel on Thursday.

Former Punjab education minister Mian Imran Masood said the out-of-school children was a big challenge for any government but retaining the enrolled students was even a bigger challenge.

Referring to utilisation of resources, he said, there was a need to bring in more resources for the education sector, but utilising available resources judiciously was even more important.

Mr Masood said there was a strange pyramid that there was a huge base of primary and elementary schools (72 per cent), while there were far less middle and high schools and even less (just 450) colleges in the province. He said this pyramid of public sector educational facilities ensured that children should drop out as they climbed up to higher classes.

To give incentive to children, he said, the previous Pervaiz Elahi government had abolished tuition fee in public schools and had foregone its income of around Rs480 million.

He said the government had also introduced a revolutionary incentive of free textbooks for children studying in public schools.

“The government will have to provide missing facilities, including classrooms, drinking water, toilet and electricity, to attract children to schools,” he said.

Mr Masood said the government would be required to ensure equity as well as access to education for all 5-16 years of age children in Punjab in the wake of Article 25-A.

Chaudhry Javed Ahmad said that out of eight million out-of-school children in the country, some 3.8 million such children were in Punjab.

In order to attract children towards education, he said, the government had opened kids centres in each primary school in Lahore and some other districts.

He said those centres were offering Early Childhood Education that would help retain children in education.

Besides optimally using the public school buildings, he said, there was a need to mobilise the public-private partnership, open community schools and above all offer skill-based education so that the schools’ pass outs could get some jobs and earn livelihood for their families.

He said that there was not a single shelter-less elementary and secondary school, while there were only a few shelter-less primary schools in the province.

Referring to Article 25-A and Punjab government’s obligations, Mr Ahmad said the subject of education had been devolved but the federal government had yet not released the resources to meet this obligation.

Punjab Education Foundation chairman Raja Anwar said the educational facilities in Punjab were in pyramid shape and added that it’s roots (primary and elementary schools) were hollow and “termite-stricken”.

He said the schools were of two to three rooms and more than one classes were sitting in a classroom resulting in no clear education for children.

He stressed that each primary school should have six classrooms and added that this equation demanded construction of some 139,000 new classrooms in existing schools and the provision of furniture. This initiative would cost some Rs400 billion, he added.

Mr Anwar said Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif had given 100,000 new vouchers to bring marginalised children to PEF-partner schools for formal education.

Mr Noul said that government schools had an enrolment of 12 million children adding that it had teachers who could cater to even double the number of children.

He claimed that some 2.8 million children had been enrolled under the Chief Minister’s School Education Road Map initiative last year.

Punjab Universitys faculty of education dean Prof Dr Hafiz Muhammad Iqbal said the enrolment in private schools had touched 33 per cent and had reached its saturation point. “Now, the government will have to step forward to educate its citizens, otherwise poor will get poorer and they will resort to extremism,” he observed.

LUMS assistant professor of economics Farooq Naseer, Unicef Education Officer Asif Abrar, Nargis Sultana and Noor-i-Hirra Waqas also spoke.