ISLAMABAD, Mar 18 (APP):Federal Minister for Education and Professional Training Shafqat Mahmood Monday said the government was committed to human development and improving education and health facilities for the people.
Speaking during a session of Human Capital Summit organized by World Bank in collaboration with its different partners here, he said main purpose of the government, as Prime Minister Imran Khan repeatedly said, was to bring people out of poverty and bring improvements in all facets of their lives.
He said when Prime Minister Imran Khan took over he mentioned in his speech the stunting of children due to lack of nutrition and out of school children.
The ministry of education had took stock of what happened in the past and was focusing on different areas, he added.
He said his ministry was making efforts to improve literacy rates, adding, after 70 years of the country’s existence 58 percent people were considered literate which meant that 42 percent people could not read and write.
He said increasing literacy rate was a challenge and raising it to 70 percent in four years would require 700,000 adult literacy centres and two million teachers.
“We are thinking about starting a national service where all graduate students contribute their time and teach the adults. But then there is the demand side as even if we set up adult literacy centres and ask students to teach how we will persuade adults to come and learn.”
The minister said statistics showed that more than 22 million children were out of school and that was a horrendously large number and no nation could afford to have such a huge number out of school.
He said the ministry was using Islamabad as a case study to understand why such a large number of kids were not sent by parents to schools, whether it was poverty, lack of access or cultural factors due to which children were not in schools.
He underlined the need for getting correct data as it was thought that 28000 children were out of school in Islamabad capital territory but a household survey showed the actual number was 11000.
So one of the problem was right collection of data and the ministry was making effort to improve the data collection to validate the figures referred to it, he added.
Shafqat said another problem was different curriculums in presently three streams of education including madaris, government schools and private elite schools, all of which had their own curriculum and certifications.
The three streams had created issue of lack of equity as those who did not get education in English were not able to compete and were left far behind, he explained.
He said to address the issue of inequity a curriculum council was set up to create similar curriculum for the core subjects in all schools in Pakistan in a effort to have a level playing field.
He said the ministry was also focusing on quality of education as at present a child who stayed in school for 10 years achieve only five years of learning.
Lastly the government was trying to impart skills to people as it was self evident that there was no point in providing an education not related to the job market, he noted.
Despite limitations due to 18th amendment, the federal government was focused on skills training and creating standards for hundreds of trades so that students could get appropriate certifications to compete in the job market, he added.
He said three million youth were coming into the job market every year and they needed right set of skills for local and international job markets.