Teachers for poll duty: Govt says move proving detrimental for academics 

Jammu: Government on Thursday admitted that the deployment of government school teachers for election duties is adversely affecting the academics and overall education standards of students in government run schools.

Minister for education Syed Muhammad Altaf Bukhari in reply to a query raised by MLA Dina Nath Bhagat during the question hour of the Legislative Assembly said that the matter has been taken with general administration department for exemption of teachers from such duties.

“Yes, teachers are presently deployed as BLOs for election related works which adversely affects the academic activities in schools. But the matter has been taken up with GAD for exemption of teachers from election related duties in order to minimize interruption in teaching activities in schools,” the minister in his reply said.

The minister also said that the pass percentage of government schools in 10th and 12th class BOSE exams had increased from past years while as only few school record zero to 20 percent results in the class 10 and 12 exams.

“And in such cases the department takes action against teaching faculty by impounding their annual increments, till they improve their performances,” the minister told the House.

The education minister in his reply informed the House that the concerned chief education officers (CEOs) have been instructed to keep a tab on such delinquent teachers so that “the students don’t suffer due to poor quality teachers.”

About the measures to improve the educational standards in the government schools, the minister said the department has revised the recruitment rules to attract the best available talent at the time of direct recruitment.

“Accordingly, the department amended recruitment rules pertaining to teachers by revising the minimum qualification from 10 2 to graduation and earmarked 30 percent posts for science and mathematics teachers,” the minister in his reply told the House.

The Minister said the department was also examining to additional proposals for amendment of the recruitment rules to further improve the quality of appointment of teachers, “which will have a cascading effect on the improvement of results in government schools.”

He said the government schools at some places were facing dearth of subject-specific teachers for which the department teachers are deployed on need-basis to meet the requirement of students.

“The department has referred 2154 posts of teachers to SSB for filling up these vacant posts under direct recruitment quota on fast-track basis and more vacancies of teachers have been identified which will be referred to SSB shortly to overcome shortage of teachers,” Bukhari said.

“Our goal is to remove a notion that government schools are not in a disadvantageous position,” he added.

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.