KARACHI: Sindh Minister for Education and Literacy Saeed Ghani has said that the government has come up with a policy that will help improve teachers’ attendance as well as their standard of teaching. Moreover, the changes will ensure maximum students’ attendance by introducing a new biometric system.

The minister was addressing a press conference at the Sindh Assembly auditorium here on Monday.

“School headmasters will be responsible for this biometric system,” he added.

He also said that thanks to increase in Sindh’s education budget, they would also be renovating old school buildings badly in need of repair in the province. “We would also be introducing 117 new schemes along with completing 186 already running older schemes by using about 80 per cent of the education budget for the year 2021-22,” he said.

The education minister announced the setting up of teachers’ training institutes (TTI) through public-private partnerships. “We have already trained some 30,000 teachers in the past year. Some 30,787 secondary school teachers have also been provided training by Microsoft,” he said.

Also, 257,000 students have been registered with Microsoft teaching applications and 252,000 primary school students are benefitting through the mobile school application MUSE. The Sindh College Lecturers YouTube channel has over 20,000 subscribers. It has some 1,800 videos of lectures uploaded.

Saeed Ghani said that some 3,057 schools that were lying closed have been reopened.

Mr Ghani also spoke about the Sindh Education Foundation (SEF), which happens to be the Sindh government’s biggest public-private partnership arm. “They are running 1,800 schools in Sindh where 475,000 students study. This year 400 new scholarships are helping these students continue their education. So Rs10.75 billion is also being set aside in the budget for SEF,” he said.

The minister said that his government is also looking at notable international organisations such as JICA that are offering accelerated learning programmes in basic education of 2.5 years to help those who had left their education for any reason catch up.

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2021