LAHORE: The Punjab government on Saturday ordered education officers to complete monitoring of 5,000 early childhood education (ECE) classrooms of the province before the start of the summer vacation on May 17.

The Programme Monitoring and Implementation Unit (PMIU) has issued a letter to all district education authorities (DEAs) of the province with instructions that all the ECE classrooms would be checked by the assistant education officers (AEOs) by May 16.

The monitoring aims at collecting the data and ensure standards of the classrooms set by the provincial government in its Punjab ECE Policy 2017. The letter said: “Early childhood education (ECE) of the third Punjab Education Sector Project (PESP-III) requires monitoring and data collection with respect to ECE classrooms to ensure that they meet the quality standards prescribed in the Punjab ECE Policy 2017”.

The data collection exercise has been delayed, according to the letter which has instructions to carry out the exercise before the vacation.

It said: “In order to assess progress against the aforementioned quality standards in the 5,000 ECE classrooms established so far, separate apps have been developed by the PITB for monitoring and evaluations assistants (MEAs) and assistant education officers (AEOs). Data through the MEA app is already being collected by the PMIU while data collection through AEOs was delayed due to the finalisation of the AEO app”.

The letter further said, “It is further stated that the AEO app has now been developed and pilot-tested to ensure that it is ready for use by all concerned AEOs. However, we are not left with many days to conduct the required observation activity. Nonetheless, in order to meet the target set by the World Bank, the observation activity needs to be undertaken on an emergency basis”.

Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2018