RAWALPINDI, July 7: The Punjab government will spend Rs5 billion on Punjab Education Sector Reforms this year, officials said here on Monday.

The programme is being supported by the World Bank.

Giving details of the programme, the officials said the amount would be spent on provision of missing facilities at the educational institutions throughout the province and improving the quality of education.

They said a programme monitoring and implementation unit had already been set up as part of the reforms. Other targets set for this year are provision of free textbooks to all primary school students, stipends to girl students of classes 6 to 8 in eight backward districts, training of teachers, strengthening of school councils for improving school governance and provision of funds for maintenance and repair and instructional material.

The proposed expenditure would also provide for awareness campaign about education through media; studies through NGOs/consultants to evaluate impact of interventions under this programme and reorganization of Punjab Education Management Information System.

Another major task before the education planners under this programme is the re-structuring of the Punjab Education Foundation.

The reforms, the officials said, were specifically designed to address the problem of low enrolments in public schools, high dropout rates, poor student-teacher ratio, inadequate school buildings, low literacy level among females, poor quality of teaching and teacher absenteeism.

“Our focus is on achieving targets and outcomes,” an official said, and added that the government was of the view that investments in education sector would directly tackle the problem of poverty alleviation.

Speaking about female education, the officials said 60 more community model schools would be established during the current fiscal year. So far, they said 543 community model schools had been set up under the Girls’ Primary Education Project.