Across the board: Single uniform curriculum to be implemented from April 1, 2021: minister

ISLAMABAD: Education Minister Shafqat Mahmood on Friday said that a single uniform curriculum would be implemented across the board from April 2021. Highlighting his ministry's performance in two years of the PTI government, he said a uniform curriculum was being brought in to fulfill the promise the party had made in its manifesto to weed out educational inequalities in the country.

This has never happened in 72 years of history that a uniform curriculum has been devised for students. He said religious seminaries would also teach this curriculum to enable children studying there to join various fields.

"The government wants madrassa students to have same employment opportunities as other pupils", he said, while adding the government's single national curriculum for elementary schooling would develop national cohesion in Pakistan.

Mahmood said that all schools in the country would teach the same curriculum for grades one through five from April next year. He said the government was also developing model textbooks to ensure that there were no differences in schooling between different institutes.

The education minister said that the government had engaged with madrassas in the development of the single national curriculum, adding that a mechanism had been devised to ensure that madrassa students received the same schooling as students in public and private schools. He said this would help provide madrassa students with the same employment opportunities as students of other institutions.

Summarizing the "revolutionary" steps taken by his ministry in the past two years, Mahmood claimed that in addition to the single national curriculum, an inter-provincial education ministers' forum had been made functional to achieve consensus decisions for the educational sector's development.

He said the Hunarmand Jawan Programme would promote technical skills among youth, and that vocational training programmes had also been initiated in that regard. He said that the National Accreditation Council would provide oversight of vocational training institutes.

On the state of higher education, the education minister said that under the Ehsaas programme, 50,000 university students would receive scholarships annually. Similarly, he said, the government had initiated programmes to provide training to nurses.

Referring to Pakistan's coronavirus response, the minister hailed the government's united response to the challenges facing the education sector. He said it had been decided to shut all educational institutes during the pandemic and a consensus had been developed to reopen them from September 15.

He reiterated that a review meeting would be held on September 7 to ensure Covid-19 remained on the decline, and it was safe to reopen educational institutes. He said the Ministry of Health would devise standard operating procedures (SOPs) for educational institutes to follow, to prevent the spread of the virus.

Lamenting that the pandemic took a heavy toll on the education sector, Shafqat Mahmood said he mobilised the forum of the inter-provincial education ministers' conference to deliberate issues related to education.

According to a Gallup survey, he said, seven to eight million children had been getting education through the "Teleschool", an educational television channel, launched by the prime minister in April to make up for academic losses suffered by students due to closure of educational institutes.

Hailing this development, he said the government had formed a new department to continue developing remote education to ensure people from across the country-especially residents of remote regions-could continue receiving education without any hindrance.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020