The opening ceremony of the first certificate in education leadership and management for Sindh and Balochistan education officials was held at Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development (AKU-IED) on Friday.
The ceremony was attended by course participants, as well as senior representatives from the public sector, AKU and ESRA.
Welcoming the course participants and guests, Dr David Taylor, Acting Provost of AKU, highlighted AKU-IED's achievements and said that the institute has helped create a critical mass of professionals who have gone through their professional development programmes and developed their knowledge and skills to improve the learning environment.
ESRA is an initiative for building institutional capacity of selected districts of Sindh and Balochistan provinces, enabling them to improve the quality of education in schools.
Secretary Education, Ghulam Ali Shah Pasha expressed his gratitude to ESRA and AKU-IED for a major initiative towards improving the quality of education in Sindh and Balochistan.
He added that AKU-IED's programme for education officials seems to be a right programme which is being offered at the right time when institutional capacity building at the district levels has just begun.
He hoped that the programme would expand institutional capacity of the public sector and reiterated that unless there were trained teachers the quality of education in schools would not improve.
He said that new initiatives for the development of Madressahs are underway with the hope to develop moderate, progressive and tolerant youth, whereby transparent registrations, scrutinised by various agencies will be conducted.
He assured that science and other disciplines will be taught in Madressahs to provide opportunities to the Madressah graduates in the job market.
Zahid Afridi, ESRA representative, highlighted the major initiative taken by ESRA, co-ordinated by a consortium of international agencies and said that it endeavours towards sustainable improvements in the education sector and specially identified four areas in this respect which include policy planning, professional development of teachers, adult literacy and private-public partnership.
Dr Sadrudin Pardhan, Acting Director of AKU-IED, shared the historic nature of the programmes.
He stressed the need to develop a whole district. If this experiment is successful it will be significant for education in Pakistan, he remarked.
The urgency to develop models of sustainability after a three-year partnership is imperative, hence IED-ESRA will work towards designing a viable model, he added.
Dr Muhammad Memon, Head of Programmes at AKU-IED, said that at the conclusion of the ceremony the programme would enable the course participants to develop a spirit of working together for a common purpose. Education officers should place high priority on maintaining good will, harmonious relations and conflict-free supervision culture.
They should work on forward looking education system which would offer good quality education in schools, he suggested.