KARACHI: The Sindh educa­tion department has slapped a blanket ban on otherwise rampant transfers and postings of school­ teachers to facilitate its placement plan aimed at correcting the stu­dent-teacher ratio, officials said.

“We have notified the ban today,” said Education Minister Syed Sardar Shah while speaking to Dawn in his office on Monday.

He said the ban would remain effective till the turn of the current academic year.

The notification says: “With the appro­val of the competent autho­rity ie the minister for education and literacy, ban is imposed on transfers and postings of all tea­ching staff with effect from Nov 6 till the end of current academic year.”

It further said no biometric change would be effective after Nov 6. However, the ban would be applicable to the teaching staff and would not affect the adminis­tra­tive positions of school education.

It will facilitate plan to ensure ideal student-teacher ratio, says minister

Minister Shah said the ban was the precursor for the effective formulation and implementation of the placement plan envisaged by the education department which would correct the existing lopsided student-teacher ratio.

Rationally, said the minister, the number of teachers in Sindh was not much less than what was required, but practically the teacher-student ratio in schools was extremely asymmetric.

“When we go to the remote rural swathes of Sindh, we witness there are many schools where teachers are either not available for students or their number is much fewer than the standard ratio; but when we go through our papers the figures are seen quite acceptable,” Shah said.

He said the government had devised a plan under which one teacher for every 30 students of a class should be made available. “The number of teachers in cities like Karachi and Hyderabad is much higher than the accepted teacher-student ratio but it is exactly the opposite in the case of rural districts where teachers are highly deficient against the required strength,” he said.

He said such situation emerged because a dominant majority of teachers got themselves trans­ferred from rural areas to the urban ones at the cost of quality of education in the remote regions.

“This has to be corrected,” he added.

Mr Shah said the department was currently in the process of devising the placement plan, which would also improve quality of education in the public sector schools of rural areas without affecting the standards in urban areas.

“We’ll see that teachers belon­ging to a particular union council in any district are posted in the school of the same area. This will also make functional the closed schools and help poorly-run schools operate perfectly.”

Officials in the department said the frequent transfers and post­ings of teachers in the province was a big obstacle in the imple­mentation of the placement plan and the ban was imposed to remove it. The ban, they said, also provided ample time to them to devise and implement the plan.

Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2018