ISLAMABAD: The Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) has asked all school heads to set up book banks to help students of non-formal educational institutions.

FDE Director Academics Saadia Adnan through a notification dated Jan 14 directed all school heads to set up book banks to ensure efficient use and optimum utilisation of free textbooks being provided to the schools by the government.

An FDE official said this was a good initiative as used books will be beneficial for students of non-formal education setup.

“For implementation of Article 25-A, the government has been providing free textbooks to students of government schools but some time we faced delay in distribution of books. If proper book banks are set up we can also handle any such delay,” he said.

“Each year free textbooks are provided to the students in FDE run educational institutions from prep to X while hundreds of students in non-formal education and philanthropic education systems remained deprived of these free textbooks.

“After the recent revision of curriculum, new books are not available in the market. Hence the students of these aforementioned stream are suffering and they are unable to achieve their academic targets,” read the notification.

“Therefore, every institution may be advised to establish its own book bank where textbooks shall be collected from the students after they appear in their final examination to be held in March.”

The notification said textbooks shall be collected and distributed among deserving students. Moreover, they can also be used as a stop-gap arrangement in case some of the titles are not available to students on time at the start of the academic session 2020-21.

Published in Dawn, January 18th, 2020