Plan to speed up progress towards educational goals ready, says Baligh

Islamabad
Minister of State for Federal Education and Professional Training Balighur Rehman on Thursday said the government had prepared a national plan of action to accelerate progress towards educational goals.
“Instead of reinventing the wheel, we need to scale up the ongoing programmes and projects in the education sector,” he said during the opening session of the ‘Need Assessment Conference on Youth Engagement, Skill Development and Employment Facilitation’.
The minister co-chaired the event with Prime Minister’s Youth Programme Chairperson Leila Khan.
The conference was organised by Prime Minister’s Youth Programme and Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training in collaboration with the United Nations in order to explore avenues for educating, training, employing and empowering youth.
The minister said education was the key to promote harmony in the community resulting in progress, peace and prosperity for the entire nation.
He said education supports democracy, civil and fundamental rights in any country. “It is unfortunate that Pakistan is lagging behind the educational targets due to various reasons. But we are determined to improve our education sector and we have taken number of initiatives in this regard,” he added.
The minister said instead of criticising previous government unnecessarily, the current government was striving to improve their programmes in order to excel in the education sector.
He said education and character building were two sides of the same coin and one side couldn’t be ignored while polishing the other.
“We have finalised the modalities of the Malala Fund which would be focusing on the gender parity and would initiate projects to enable girls from the remote areas to have an easy access to the quality education,” he added.
The minister said the government was also focusing on the enhancement of technical and vocational training facilities along with the research and development.
He said the national vocational qualification framework had been finalised, while vocational secondary schools from sixth grade to 10th grade would be launched very soon. “Our goal is to increase the budget allocation of the education sector in near future provided that our economy and tax to GDP ratio also increase simultaneously,” he said.
He added that during the last PML-N government, the country’s tax to GDP ratio was around 13 per cent and that around 2.6 per cent of the budget was allocated for education but the government’s ouster in an undemocratic way caused the goals to remain unachieved.
“We have immense potential to grow and to improve the socio-economic conditions of our population and there is firmness in us which would help us achieve our targets very soon,” he said.
The minister said he was hopeful that the current year would turn out to be the year of progress for education in the country.