Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and public schools

To be sure, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa faces many challenges due the militancy fault line on which the province rests. Yet is seems that after five years in power, the PTI has not performed as well as had been expected on the education front.

In fact, the All Primary Teachers Association (APTA) is planning a province-wide protest against the local set-up’s formula regarding teacher promotions as well as the interference of non-governmental organisations in drawing up education policies. At the heart of the matter are accusations that the KP government, having tabled an education bill in consultation with the APTA, went on to add new clauses and had it approved ‘unilaterally’.

The APTA maintains that it had signed off on four points, including the giving of an unconditional time scale to teachers. Yet it stresses that the KP government is pushing for promotion to be dependent on eight years uninterrupted teaching of a particular grade. The APTA argues that no teachers fulfil this condition.

The PTI-led government has responded by directing all district education officers (DEOs) to monitor attendance records across the public education sector. Teachers are expected to prove 90 percent on this front while students are afforded more leeway, being granted 82 percent on a month-by-month basis. Failure on this front will result in relevant DEOs forfeiting one day’s salary for every month attendance targets are not met.

This is unfortunate. Public school teachers need to be invested in across the country. For recent reports find that the government system is failing students; with many not being taught essential skills. Indeed, in KP, some 51 percent of girls are out of school. Thus what is needed is an overhauling of the entire provincial education system. A good place to start would be the rescinding of the Rs277 million earmarked for a controversial madrassa and investing this amount in the public education sector; with a view to bringing all seminary students into the mainstream. This should not be too hard given that PTI chief Imran Khan has announced that the KP government is all set to boycott the upcoming budget for FY 2018-19, given that it is about to complete its five-year tenure and therefore lacks any sort of mandate going forward.

Yet in the interim, the KP government and the APTA need to sit down together. For the prospect of some 86,000 primary school teachers effectively going on strike to protest what they describe as the local leadership’s non-serious attitude public education does not speak well of the PTI-led government’s record on this front.