Punjab Education Minister Imran Masood has said that a special 'Monitoring System' had been introduced for checking the attendance of the teachers. For this purpose, he said that special teams had been constituted to check the attendance of teachers in educational institutions of the province. The monitoring teams were suddenly visiting educational institutions to check the presence of teachers in the institutions and these teams would submit their reports to the Education Department, and in the light of these reports, strict action would be taken against the teachers found absent from the schools, he said.
Addressing the inaugural ceremony of the Government Elementary Model School, Sambrial, on Saturday, he said all middle and high schools would be upgraded in the province.
The minister said that free textbooks worth Rs 650 million were being distributed among the students, besides the government would provide free textbooks from Class I to Class X from next year.
Imran Masood said the government had made education affordable by announcing free education as a result of which a large number of students had been enrolled in government schools in the province.
Special attention had been accorded to improve the condition of the government schools besides, under Education Sector Reforms Programme, missing facilities like additional classrooms, washrooms, and boundary walls as well as drinking water; furniture and electricity were being provided on top priority basis, he added. The provincial education minister said that after hectic spadework the "ghost schools" had been vanished from the province.
Special attention, under Punjab Education Sector Reforms programme, has been accorded to ensure basic facilities in educational institutions of the province, he said, adding, at present, 63,000 government schools were functioning of which 40,000 schools were without basic facilities.
Speaking on the occasion, Punjab Public Accounts Committee (PAC) Chairman Muhammad Azeem Noori Ghumman said that Sambrial would be made model tehsil of the Punjab.
Punjab Anti-Corruption Director-General Brigadier Muhammad Aslam (Retd) also spoke on the occasion, and pledged to eliminate the menace of corruption from government departments for providing relief to the common man.
Earlier, Government Elementary Model School Principal Muhammad Sanaullah Rubbani presented the address of welcome.
On this occasion, the Punjab Education Minister announced the upgradation of the school to high level.