TAXILA: Deputy Commissioner Attock Rao Atif Raza has said an enrollment drive has been launched at the beginning of the new academic year to bring more and more children to school.

He expressed these views while addressing a function held to kick off the school enrollment drive at Municipal Committee Boys High School Attock on Friday.

Chief Executive Officer District Education Authority Malik Mohsin Abbas, District Education Officer Ikram Zia, District Officer Elementary Education Syed Taqqi Shah and officials of the local administration and education department were also present.

Speaking on the occasion, the DC emphasised the importance of education, terming it ‘the third eye of human being’ and said every child had the right to acquire education. He said that effective measures need to be formulated, adopted and implemented to ensure ‘education for all’ on a priority basis.

He said children aged up to four years will be enrolled in the playgroup and early childhood classes while those aged between five and 12 years will be given admissions from nursery to grade five.

The chief executive officer of District Education Authority said that a target of enrolling 6778 out of school children had been included in the campaign.

“We have developed school-specific targets as per available capacity of the schools, including infrastructure and teachers,” he said.

Focal person enrollment programme Amjad Mehmood said the drive would continue till May. He said that during the past year Attock got top position in achieving the highest enrollment target and this year all the education officials were striving to achieve the distinction again through community mobilisation.

According to Munnaza Peerzada, chairperson of a local NGO working in the education and social sector, Pakistan is among nine countries that have the most number of out-of-school children at the primary level or of age 5-9. She added that in 2016 a report by the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) had said 5.6 million primary-aged children remained out of school across Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, March 25th, 2023