The Ministry of Education has established two consortiums under Education Sector Reforms (ESR) programme, one each for Sindh and Balochistan, to further foster the public and private sector partnership in education.
Officials in the Ministry of Education said on Friday that the USAID funded ESR programme's consortiums were established with the partnership of Provincial Bureaus of Curriculum, Provincial Institutes for Teachers Education, Sindh & Balochistan Universities and private organisations/NGOs and Aga Khan University.
The government under its Education Sector Reform (ESR) programme is focussing on four key areas, including policy planning, professional development, adult and youth literacy and fostering public private partnership in education.
The ESR operates in Sindh, Balochistan and the Islamabad Capital Territory approximately 11,000 primary schools and works with more than 30,000 teachers.
The professional development (PD) programme of USAID/ESRA is to develop a sustainable professional development infrastructure through capacity building of over 3,000 school heads and education managers. It works with over 45 provincial institutions of Sindh and Balochistan comprising all the elementary colleges, colleges of education, bureaus of curriculum, to strengthen their capacity. It also works to establish union council level infrastructure for PD, thus getting as close to the school as possible; creating a human resource base and establishing resource centers.
A large number of district education officials were provided training enabling them to manage and organise district professional development programmes in a better way. The programme is being implemented in 12 districts of Sindh, Balochistan and ICT and provided training to almost 1,000 master trainers, established over 500 cluster centers to provide a resource base as close to the teachers as possible.
District Professional Development Forums (PDF) were also established in all the districts. The PDFs work as a consultative forum to take into account areas of needs, issues, problems and planning. They said that under the USAID/ESR programme two consortiums, one each in Sindh and Baluchistan, including the Provincial Bureaus of Curriculum, Provincial Institutes for Teacher Education, Sindh & Baluchistan Universities and private organisations/NGOs; Aga Khan University also a partner in training of teachers, were also established.
They said that the objectives of ESR were to continue working at the policy level to increase final outlays for professional development and education, locate incentives for teachers to pursue professional development, and seeking government assistance in mainstreaming the 1,000 mentors/master trainers to strengthen government supervisory system.