Search Page

The Boarding Schools Association (BSA) chairman Melvyn Roffe has declared that thousands of vulnerable children are being denied the chance to go to a boarding school because of ignorance and prejudice in local councils. He has also stated that there are hundreds of children whose life would be transformed by having a place in one of those schools, but because of bureaucratic procedures they are condemned to an ever diminishing circle of failure.

The Sindh Education Minister says that there are 7,700 ghost schools in the province. There is, however, finally some good news regarding this issue: on April 5, 2009 the miscreants who had occupied the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto School at Goth Qaim Kharrul of the Dadu district decided to move out. However, arithmetic tells us that if we continue at this rate, it will take us 7,700 more years to eliminate all of them! And that's only in our province - according to our estimations, there are around 25,000 ghost schools in the country.

As a result of the increasing economic scandals, business universities and schools around the world are now interested in including ethics classes in their programs. They are concerned with idea that students are not equipped to deal with ethical dilemmas, therefore several activities that involve the analysis of the causes and consequences of the crises, visits to convicted of fraud and projects to change are taking place.

Afghanistan must now confront a problem in education: the lack of text books. Millions of new books pledged and paid for by donors have not been delivered due to corruption and bureaucratic snags. According to figures that emerged from the interviews of officials from 34 Afghan provinces, about one third of the textbooks ordered last year never reached their destination. Currently, learners have no other option than to illegally copy books that are available for purchase.

As a result of corruption and bureaucracy, millions of new books promised and paid by donors in 2008 were never delivered. About a third of them are still waiting to be distributed to the provinces and lots of the textbooks ordered were so poorly made that they may not last a second year.

As the academic results improve due to a national curriculum that contains coherence and a continuation, the government is concerned with the fact that the increase of private tutoring expenses could open an edge between poor and rich students. Therefore, governmental online tutoring programs are being released in order to compete with the enterprises specialists in teaching services.

Two of the most prestigious high school institutions are been blame of sending home earlier the children in order to save substantial utilities and teacher's allowances, of detaining children at school in holydays and of asking parents to pay fees twice in the same term.

The education minister has said that secondary-school graduation diplomas awarded from this year on would be designed and prepared by his department and incorporate security features to make them forgery-proof. He added that the certificates would be free of charge and hence neither school heads nor school boards could receive payment for them.

The President has denied the claim of schools to charge monetary lunch fee for pupils under the Universal Primary Education (UPE), arguing that this program was conceived for poor families that could not afford additional fees. Besides, he declared that the pay of un-necessary amounts of money will create additional barriers to the free UPE as the ones that already exist; expensive uniforms, books, tours and others items.