PESHAWAR: The higher education department has established a special cell to accelerate efforts for improving quality of education in the province and achieve the intended learning outcomes in government colleges.

The Quality Assurance Cell will supervise the quality enhancement cells set up in 150 government colleges, which offer four-year Bachelor of Studies (BS) programmes, officials told Dawn.

“We are moving from brick and mortar towards working on brains of the students for whom educational institutions are established,” higher education secretary Manzoor Ahmad told Dawn.

He said in the past, most of the education budget was spent on the payment of salary to teachers and construction of buildings, while little attention was paid to the quality of education in colleges.

The secretary said ironically, the province couldn’t put up a quality educational institution like the Islamia College Peshawar in the last 100 years.

He said besides ensuring quality in educational institutions, the reward and punishment policy would also be implemented for feeling the impact of the teachers’ trainings to be provided under the initiative.

“We will also send a good number of teachers to the United Kingdom to learn teaching methodologies and study the education system there,” he said.

Adviser of the Quality Assurance Cell Prof Shafiq Ahmed said the new initiative of the QAC’s establishment at the provincial level and QEC in college level to introduce quality culture in all government colleges of the province. The adviser said the programme would ensure better quality of teaching, learning, and governance in colleges through quality enhancement cells and reporting of exam results to quality assurance cell.

He said the teachers, courses and students would be evaluated by the QAC and QEC through proper procedure.

“All courses will be made market-oriented to help new graduates get jobs,” he said.

The HED secretary said the relevant quality assurance procedures set out by the Higher Education Commission were being implemented in colleges to carry out the teachers’ evaluation by students, evaluation of courses and programmes by teachers and students, and institutional performance evaluation by the faculty, alumni and graduating students.

He said the college level QECs would be linked with their affiliated universities’ section working for the improvement of quality education.

The secretary said almost all colleges with the four-year BS programme had already notified their focal persons and teams for the implementation of quality procedures.

He said the QAC had undertaken the training of all focal persons as its first major activity, while the first training programme was arranged on the summer campus of the Peshawar University in Baragali few days ago, where 45 teachers were trained on how to use tools and methods of reporting feedback.

The secretary said the training programme would continue for two to three months to be followed by inspection of colleges for the assessment of learning environment and implementation status of quality assurance procedures. He said the first batch of training comprised 40 focal persons from 40 government colleges, including 16 women.

Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2019