KHYBER: Provincial minister for secondary and primary education Arshad Ayub said on Tuesday that special attention would be paid to girls’ education and overcoming shortage of teachers in Khyber tribal district.
During a visit to Jamrud where he met officials of the district education office, he insisted on gender equality in the existing education system as education was the basic right of every girl for which the provincial government will provide them equal opportunities.
He said the provincial government was further expanding the double shift classes programme in all the government schools in the province where as many as 1050 schools were currently functioning under the said system, while another one thousand schools would be included in the double shift programme after due consultation with Chief Minister Muhammad Suhail Afridi.
“The basic objective of starting double shift classes is to provide more learning opportunities to students at the existing school structures instead of building new schools”, he added.
He informed the officials of the district education office that more educational institutions would be included in the new development schemes in order to overcome lack of basic facilities in all the schools. “We are also trying to recruit new teachers from the parent-teachers fund on an ad hoc basis in order to overcome the shortage of teaching staff on an emergency basis,” he said on the occasion.
He said that a summery regarding bifurcating the existing primary education directorate into two had been submitted to the provincial cabinet as the government wanted to focus more on the primary education as no better results could be achieved without a strong educational foundation of our children.
He directed the district monitoring officer to conduct regular visits of all the schools and regularly check the attendance of both teachers and students while making the officials bound to personally go into the field and personally assess the situation.
He also assured the teachers community about the resolution of their long-standing promotion issues.
Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2026