LAHORE: The Punjab School Education Department (SED) has identified 11 districts of the province to establish 110 model schools featuring fully-equipped classrooms, auditoriums and grounds.

Provincial Minister for School Education Murad Raas on Wednesday held a meeting at Quaid-i-Azam Academy for Educational Development with education-chief executive officers (CEOs) of the 11 districts and head teachers of the 110 selected schools.

The project aims at improving facilities and infrastructure of the established schools to provide conducive learning environment for students.

Under the project, the school education department will construct 2,000 rooms for teaching and learning activities in public schools, capacity building of librarians, Science and IT teachers along with provision of necessary equipment and books in selected schools and to transform National Museum of Science and Technology as a centre for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) learning.

The Programme Monitoring and Implementation Unit of the school education department is spearheading the planning and implementation of the short-term programme with a timeline of 10 months starting from June 2019 to March 2020.

The Department for International Development has provided 35 million pounds for the project.

A Model School will have 40 to 45 students per section, new classrooms and furniture with white boards, soft boards and necessary stationery and LEDs (if strength per classroom is more than 50), well-maintained science labs for biology, physics and chemistry, computer labs with the provision of state of the art facilities including core i3 desktops, multimedia kits and provision of internet, state of the art libraries with an impressive index of titles and other facilities like, LEDs and MMPs etc.

Other facilities include toilets with a ratio of 1:50, sports grounds with provision of necessary sports equipment, art and music rooms with provision of necessary resources, fully functional canteen with good hygienic food available, medical and prayer rooms, safety equipments, learning spaces designed to enhance varied and interactive activities, well-equipped staff rooms, meeting rooms for joint staff meetings/auditorium, common rooms for senior students, facilities for physically challenged students, including ramps at the entrance and proper signage available for all the above stated provisions.

Mr Raas said the department had only three months to complete the project, otherwise its funds would be lapsed.

He said head teachers should personally monitor the progress of the project and should report any mismanagement.The minister said that strict action would be taken against the CEOs and head teacher for not completing the project on time and he would not listen to any excuse.

He said school councils, CEOs and deputy commissioners would issue funds for the project.

He said several teams would monitor the construction and other works of the schools and they would directly report to him if they found any delay and discrepancy.

He said the department would adopt a rationalise policy to meet the deficiency of the school teachers in the model schools. One of the participants head teacher Hassan Mehmood said that they did not know about the tender and start date of the project and also did not have any executive power.

He said they would not issue funds if the standard of different works of the project were not maintained.

Published in Dawn, December 12th, 2019