The Sindh Education Foundation (SEF) in collaboration with Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA) organized the provincial launch of the "Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) Pakistan - 2014" for the Sindh Province here on Wednesday. Addressing the launching ceremony, Dr Fazlullah Pechuho, Additional Chief Secretary-Education, Government of Sindh, said that there is also dearth of merit-based HR as teachers have not been hired on merit for the last 30 years.
He expressed his desire for conducting a policy dialog involving political parties, educationists and private entrepreneurs. He said that the Sindh government's Adopt-a-School policy was a robust one in which institutes are given chance to 'adopt' schools by signing a MoU with the government. He also mentioned that the Sindh government was also framing a policy for early childhood education as well as non-formal education in order to strengthen the education system at grassroots level from the platform of public-private partnership.
Baela Raza Jameel, Director of Programs, ITA, shared the findings of the ASER Pakistan 2014 in detail. She expressed pleasure over the fact that citizens could rise and collect extensive data in 14.5 weeks. She appreciated the talent that the citizens show to collect the door-to-door survey throughout the country. She lamented the fact that the citizens were not assigned the duty of the census and that it was years ago that the country had its census.
She called the ASER a 'social movement' of the educated individuals of the country. She also informed that label ASER was a brand under which various partner organisations are working throughout the process from conceptualisation to printing of the report. She said that it was a welcome step in March 2013 when the Sindh Assembly passed the Sindh Act of Right to Education (Article 25-A).
She revealed the statistics achieved as a result of the ASER survey which was, according to her, citizen-led large-scale national household survey for the 3-16 years aged children. She called the ASER the largest data set to date which is being quoted in policy documents and reports at national as well as international level. The ASER tools include Reading (Urdu, Sindhi and Pashto), Arithmetic, English and General Knowledge as categories. Assessments are based on Class II level curriculum for English and Class III for Urdu, Sindhi and Pashto languages.
Ms Jameel informed the audience that for the year 2014, it covered 144 rural districts and 21 urban districts collecting information on 279,427 children (3-16 years) and 93,093 households in 4,698 villages and blocks. She said that Malir in Karachi has the highest in school children at 97 percent as compared to other rural districts of Sindh. She informed that 7 percent increase was seen in the trend of children enrolling with the private schools for 6-16 as well as 6-10 years old children. She called it a point to ponder for the government that can take it as a policy change to go for low-cost private schools in rural areas.
Talking about the dilemma of multi-grading in classrooms, she said it was alarming to know that 70 percent of class II, III and IV sat together in 2013 and 74 percent in 2014. Aziz Kabani, Managing Director of Sindh Education Foundation said that it was inspiring to see although slight improvement in access to educational facilities and increase in literacy rate in Sindh. He said that the event was not only to launch the ASER-Pakistan 2014 report, but also a chance for government officials to inform the audience about initiatives that are being taken to improve the education status at the grassroots level.
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