I REMEMBER it was in 1992 that I received a shock that I’m still recovering from. Just as I stepped out of my class, a colleague of mine bumped into me and asked if I could donate Rs100. When I sought the reason for the donation he said that an inspection team from the education department was to visit our school. But why that would require donations from every teacher was something that he did not elaborate upon.
Anyhow, without knowing the purpose, I forked out Rs100 to him. The next day, I saw headmaster of the school giving different orders to his staff. He asked the peon to clean every class so that when the inspection team arrived, it would find the school in a spick and span condition.
The interesting thing was that the headmaster was least worried about the progress of teachers and students. What he was particularly keen on was what dishes would be served to the monitoring team when it would arrive.
I saw him set up a food committee and ask the committee to bring a variety of edibles in order to entertain the guests properly.
All the teachers were directed to get their respective classrooms decorated with good-looking placards carrying beautiful verses, quotations and poems and adorn the classrooms with colourful buntings.
Some other teachers were also directed to make sure that exercise books of their students were updated and try and maintain discipline during inspection.
I was a novice to the profession and was quite scared of the inspection team. I was expecting the entire process to be a difficult one.
With every passing day my concern and anxiety increased. I was getting more fearful by the minute. Owing to the weak performance of the students in virtually all subjects in my class, I thought that chances were they would be severely criticized by the monitoring team.
And then came the day when the inspection team stepped into the school at around 11:30am. I became pretty jittery and was really nervous to confront the team.
The headmaster gave a splendid reception to the inspection team and started off by offering them tea before they could inspect the school.
Later on, the headmaster took a few members of the team to different classes, while some other officers including the district education officer (DEO) remained in his office. Very soon, members of the food committee also arrived with dishes from the bazaar and the food table was laid with sumptuous dishes. The teachers who were busy with inspection were also invited to lunch.
After having lunch, a few formalities were carried out and the team’s departure marked the end of the inspection.
I’ve witnessing the same exercise for the last 10 years. In Balochistan hardly any surprise visits to schools take place as education officers are always found busy with maintaining their own office and the education system.
About two weeks prior to the monitoring exercise, inspection schedules are released so that schools could properly prepare themselves for properly receiving education officers.
Numerous factors can be ascribed to the declining standard of education in Pakistan and a poor monitoring system is one of them.
The following changes are needed to be made in order to achieve the required result as far as the process of inspection goes:
1. Objective question papers carrying queries related to all subjects should be distributed to all students of the class that is being scrutinized so that the performance of every student could be gauged.
2. Quality education should be the top most priority rather than decorating the school to impress the inspectors.
3. The recommendations of the monitoring team should be implemented at any cost. The implementation would also force the school teachers to take the monitoring team seriously.
4. There should be surprise visits to schools throughout the academic year.
