Punjab govt to hire more teaching staff for public schools

LAHORE: In a ground breaking move, the Punjab government has recently taken the initiative to meet the staffing gaps in public schools across the province.

The School Education Department, has ordered the CEOs of District Education Authorities to prepare and submit comprehensive plans for recruitment against vacant posts in their respective areas.

The process will be coordinated by a five-member committee, headed by the SED additional secretary. The committee will evaluate the plans and oversee the recruitment of all staff, both teaching and non-teaching.

The committee includes the Directors of Public Instructions for Secondary and Elementary Education, a deputy director of monitoring, an additional program Director, and a departmental representative.

Also, the other aspect of the initiative is to merge the staff from outsourced institutions and thus bring on board the requisite expertise, directly targeted at non-teaching roles, for the maximum possible performance of the schools.

The Monitoring Unit will be the most important part in identifying schools that have staff under-posting vacancies, allowing them to be followed by the new staff determined to be posted.

However, teachers waiting for assignment are not to be posted to those schools giving rise to empowerment, wherein such schools have been planned for outsourcing in subsequent reform phases.

According to a senior official of SED, through this plan, Punjab’s quality of education will improve as the service deficiencies will have been reduced to provide a better learning climate and standards of education.

This is part of government efforts to remodel the education system, where challenges such as more than 115,000 teacher shortages only in primary schools have plagued. The government has also announced plans to recruit an additional 30,000 school teachers to meet this shortage.