PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government on Thursday introduced the ‘rationalisation policy for schools’ in Peshawar, Charsadda, Nowshera, Mardan and Swabi saying teachers in all these districts will be transferred and posted to schools in the nearest places of their choice for lifetime.

The policy will be extended to other parts of the province afterwards.

The announcement of the rationalisation policy’s introduction came during a meeting, which was chaired by Chief Minister Pervez Khattak at the Chief Minister’s Secretariat here on Thursday, according to a handout issued here.

Provincial education minister Mohammad Atif Khan, adviser to the chief minister Rafaqatullah Babar, the relevant administrative secretaries and senior officials attended the meeting.

According to the policy, future recruitment of teachers will be made on school basis, where they will have to perform duty until retirement and show results.

Also, teachers will get promotions and incentives on the basis of examination results.

The chief minister, according to the handout, told participants that the introduction of comprehensive system for identifying ghost schools and proxy teachers and ensuring attendance was the need of the hour to bring positive changes in education sector and improve the standard of education in the province.

He said transparent and candid policies, including those meant to eradicate corruption, strengthen institutions and ensure good governance, had increased the international community’s confidence in the provincial government and that a number of the European Union countries and donor agencies, including Britain’s Department for International Development had extended generous financial and technical support to his government for reforming all sectors, especially education.

Mr Khattak expressed satisfaction with the performance of the Independent Monitoring Unit in the education department, saying 475 monitors recruited by the new entity in a transparent manner conducted surveys of more than 25,000 schools in the province in a short period of three months besides collecting comprehensive data, including attendance of students and teachers, missing facilities, including furniture, toilets and water needs.

He said the monitoring mechanism would stay put, while concrete steps would be taken to improve the standard of education in light of the IMU surveys.

The chief minister said he was hopeful that monitoring of schools by the education department and DFID would contribute a lot to the improvement of education system in the province.

He said the monitoring system would not only simplify action against corrupt and incompetent elements in the education department but would also help improve the standard of education in the province.

Mr Khattak said the PTI-led government had done away with the class-based colonial system of education, which was introduced by the Britishers as a symbol of slavery in the Indian subcontinent.

“We’ve introduced a unified educational system of international standard from the academic year to end difference between the children of the rich and those of the poor and enable them to compete on all fronts equally,” he said, adding that the system would turn out to bring about an educational and economic revolution in the next decade.

The chief minister said the government had stopped interference in all government departments and claimed that all appointments, including teachers, were being made on merit.

He said he was delighted that the process of recruiting 14,000 teachers in the province had begun.

“Eight thousand teachers have been recruited, while the rest are being appointed through the National Testing Service,” he said.

Mr Khattak said his government had ended the past policy of setting up primary schools in two rooms and appointing two teachers there and that in future, every primary school in the province would have at least six rooms and one teacher for 40 students.“It will be a great achievement if we manage to end political interference in the education department. And if we do so, then the quality of education at government schools will be far better than that of private schools,” he said.