Chandigarh, December 13:
The Punjab government led by Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann is making continuous efforts to make the ‘Mission-100 Percent’ campaign a success to bring a revolutionary reform in school education in the state.
It is under these efforts that today the Minister of School Education Punjab Harjot Singh Bains took a major decision and directed the District Education Officers to deploy 749 Block and District Mentors (BM and DM) of Science, Mathematics and English/Social Studies Subjects in schools with an immediate effect.
According to the Education Minister, at present 680 teachers of these subjects were doing field duty as block mentors and 69 teachers as district mentors instead of teaching in schools. According to S. Bains, the purpose of the ‘Mission-100 Percent’ campaign is not to get hype by presenting fake statistics but to increase the learning efficiency of every student by improving the quality of education.
S. Bains said he had received reports from some districts that departmental rules were not followed when making these deployments, which clearly state that no mentors be deployed in middle schools, but only one mentor in single-teacher middle schools can be deployed.
Similarly, making these deployments, schools in remote and backward areas which are suffering from staff crunch should be covered first. Then schools with 50% staff and is in a dire need for a teacher of a subject should be covered. Likewise, Mentors should be deployed in schools where there is no teacher of the concerned subject.
According to the Education Minister, prejudice or bias against any teacher should be avoided and these deployments should not be done in big schools where one a few posts are vacant, in urban areas or schools near cities.
The Education Minister said that these deployments will be done till further orders and written orders in this regard will be issued today by the District Education Officers of the Secondary Department who are solely responsible for making these deployments transparent and effective manners.
S. Bains categorically said that now before the half-holiday, the teacher or head of any school will not mark as on-duty for any meeting or office work and if he has to go somewhere for urgent reasons, he must first get approval from the concerned District Education Officer.
The Education Minister said that these teams will also focus on schools with low results and all the members of the improvement team will visit the classes of that school. Instead of teaching and giving instructions, they will act as model teachers by making unique presentations in front of teachers and students.
S. Bains said that he will not tolerate any kind of lapse as he is fully committed to provide quality education to the people of Punjab.
