KARACHI, Dec 28: Some effective innovations practised by civil society and education organisations to address the issues of quality, transparency and real concerns of the communities can be incorporated and replicated to improve the public education system. These were the views of different speakers on Thursday at the launching of a research study report prepared by Sindh Education Foundation (SEF) with the support of Commonwealth Education Foundation, UK.

Organised by the Sindh Education Foundation, which supports/directly runs over a thousand schools in the province giving access to education to over 150,000 children mostly girls, the occasion was the launch of its report, Documenting Educational Innovations.

Funded by the Commonwealth Education Fund, UK, this research study explores the innovative models and practices of some schools in Sindh and Punjab run by civil society organisations.

The research study, titled Documenting Educational Innovations which was awarded to SEF early this year, sought largely to expand the emphasis on sate delivery through successful mechanism employed in the civil society organisations.

“The government must strengthen their commitment to supporting new ideas and innovations in education through financial commitment and transition of political power and accountability from paper to reality”, the SEF researchers recommended.

It was further said in the report that government had made primary education free, compulsory and in some cases also provided stipends, scholarships, subsidised textbooks, but those could meet only with frictional success, while the vast majority of state schools were felt to be lacking in teaching and curriculum quality and thus were failing to provide meaning or relevance to contemporary circumstances.

The field coordinators interviewed in the course of the study claimed that community surveys indicated that poor parents saw education as a dead end” particularly the parents of girls.

On the other hand the private sector schools with their nature of provision of education generated widespread discrimination in access and opportunity limiting it to a small subpopulation of the urban populace which can afford to send children to private schools, the study included.

The third tiers rises in response to the gaps in service delivery sustainability by the public and private sectors comprises the community schools set up mainly by Non-governmental Organisations and Civil Society Organisations.

While presenting the synopsis and findings of the CEF-UK sponsored study, Aziz Kabani, Assistant Director of SEF claimed that the process of creating an education system that was appropriate for the diverse people of Pakistan, with the right mix of local, national and international elements by forming meaningful public-private partnership, was a process that would take both time and the willingness to experiment and try new approaches and ideas.

The study was o an attempt to note and document how gaps of service delivery evinced in educational indicators were addressed by the civil society sectors. Our objective was to identify practical dimensions of practice along which the different sectors can collaborate and move forwards along, Mr Kabani mentioned.

The research samples included about 2,000 schools run by nine civil society organisations in Sindh and 11 in the Punjab, said a member of the research team.

CSO initiatives in education have sought to circumvent the most prevalent setbacks faced by public sector education systems, namely spatial disparity, high drop out rate and an ossified curriculum, through grassroots initiatives in conjunction with the community, it was said in the research report. The practices documented by the SEF highlighted community mobilisation and volunteerism to be the hallmark of the CSOs operating in the education sector in the country.

In the current discourse, the primary role of civil society is envisioned as the accountability of government to deliver the basic services to the citizen and mobilising the political will to such commitment through activism, the report said.

The study included various suggestions towards relevance of curriculum with the community, retention of students at schools, betterment in teacher-students ratio, and location of schools to encourage enrolment and attendance.

Earlier welcoming the guests, Prof Anita Ghulam Ali, the Managing Director of SEF, observed that the growing demand for education has also created awareness of the problems in this field.

Dr Hamida Khuhro, the Sindh Education Minister who had to take the brunt of complaints from two educators in the audience who had suffered at the hands of her department, was honest in explaining the performance of her department.

Defending the policy of introducing English from class one, the minister said that all government schools will be provided computers soon and a knowledge of English was essential for the students to use them.

Dr Adib Rizvi, the director of the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, presented what he termed the SIUT model of public-private partnership which entails the community’s participation in supporting a government project for the benefit of the community.

The panelists included Mr Moinuddin Haider, the former governor of Sindh who has adopted four schools in Karachi, educationist Abbas Husain and Fatema Surraiya Bajya, whose presence is much sought after on such occasions because of her encouraging demeanour.