PESHAWAR, July 1: The sports and physical education activities in government schools are being conducted under non-professional officials, which often cause problems in proper selection of teams and scheduling and organising tournaments, said officials.

They said that with the bifurcation of management and teaching cadres in elementary and secondary education department in early 2011, the posts of assistant district officer (ADO) for sports and physical education were also abolished and officials working on such posts were sent to schools for teaching jobs.

The officials said that inside schools, the sports and physical education activities were organised by physical education teachers (PETs), while organising tournaments on tehsil, district and province level was the responsibility of ADO sports, who needed to be a professionals.

Each ADO sports was responsible for organising tournaments, selecting teams for district tournament, making arrangements for scout camps, civil defence trainings, tree plantation campaign in schools etc with the help of PETs.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government for the first time made rules for the promotion of sports in the province in 2010. Under these rules, participation of students, both boys and girls, was made compulsory in annual tournaments of different games played on town, district and provincial levels. The rules equally apply to private schools.

Under the present arrangements, one of the management cadre ADOs, who are non-professionals, organise tournaments on district level though they don’t know about rules of games. The sources said that the ADOs, having no degree or diploma in sports, were often found helpless to solve problems technical or otherwise during tournaments.

Under the old system, senior diploma in physical education was compulsory for officials posted as ADOs sports, they said.

“The professionals learn all rules of games or play those games during their diploma training,” a PET told Dawn.

The officials not familiar with sports and posted as ADO sports were exposed in recent tournaments, he said and added that they were unable even to become referees in matches and officials who had served on the same posts in old system were asked to help them organise tournaments.

The technical support being provided to the PETs in schools from the offices of executive district offices, education, has also been stopped since removal of professional sports officials, said one of the EDOs education.

When contacted, minister for Elementary and Secondary Education Sardar Hussain Babak told this correspondent that they would soon decide on reshuffling ADOs between the management and teaching cadres to bring professional officials on the posts of ADO sports.