HR department provides free educational facilities to 28,000 workers’ children
LAHORE: Labour & Human Resource Department is providing free educational facilities to 28,000 workers’ children through a network of 38 Workers Welfare Schools situated in the 19 districts of the province.
It now has also planned to provide free quality education to the workers children through partner schools in six more districts where Workers Schools are not available to labourers’ children.
In the initial phase, 50,000 deserving students will be accommodated in their nearby institutions while Labour Department will pay the dues to schools. A total cost of Rs 900 million is expected to be incurred on this project. This was stated by Punjab Labour & Human Resource Minister Muhammad Ashraf Khan Sohna during his visit of Punjab Education Foundation on Wednesday.
On the occasion Managing Director PEF Mohyuddin Ahmad Wani briefed the Labour Minister about PEF model of public private partnership for providing free education to the poor students, adding that administrative as well as financial autonomy helped to develop a firm system of monitoring & evaluation and besides this, biannual conduction of quality assurance tests also help in maintaining meaningful check on their academic standards. Keeping in view the success of Education Voucher Scheme in city slums, it has been planned to increase the total number to 40,000, he said. Number of EVS partner schools will also be increased to 200 during 2010-11.
Ashraf Sohna informed that secondary education leading to grant of Matric-tech certificate is planned in six schools, in the first phase. Students will also be offered various technical courses. It will help to make up for the trained manpower for the industrial sector, he maintained.
PEF-MD maintained that Harvard University, USA’ two Professors have offered to re-design EVS Voucher to make it more meaningful for the students. He informed that process of identification of NGOs for the re-functioning of 1006 non-functional schools has been finalised. He offered to help Labour Department in capacity building and assistance in monitoring and evaluation of its education projects so that desired results could be achieved.
It was agreed in the meeting that both departments will enhance mutual co-operation for fostering education in the marginalised families. PEF’s DMD (O) Tanvir A Zaffar, DMD (F) Salman Anwar Malik, besides Director (Education) Workers Welfare Board, Mian Anjum Shakoor also attended the meeting.
Source: Business Recorder
Date:9/2/2010
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