Daily Times

PESHAWAR: Avoided actual status of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa education system, Alif Ailaan a non-profit organization evaluating education performance of the province and set invisible indicators in district wise annual ranking reports.

However, the concerned authorities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Education Department also have reservations and said that all these reports are baseless and have no actual statistics.

Alif Ailaan is an Islamabad based organization working in education sector and helping out government and non-government data for making the evaluation of different region in Pakistan; however, the organization has no formal network and structure in KP.

The organization in its report published in 2016 claimed that updated statistics have been used to produce a measure of education standard in every district of the province.

Elementary and Secondary Education Department (E&SED) officials denied any fresh data to be used for measurement and evaluation in the education sector.

Pleading anonymity, they said that the provincial government is working on emergency basis to collect accurate data and statistics to be used before drawing future plans. He said all stake-holders and private organizations, including Ailf Ailaan is saving its face by manipulating the decade old data to publish the ranking system in the province.

The National Testing Service (NTS) Teachers Association Malakand president Sikandir Azam told Daily Times that he has never been interacted with the representative of Ailf Ailaan since he took over charge as a government school teacher in the district.

He said that the Alif Ailaan has ranked Malakand District among the district underlined for their best performance in the province, but ground realities are totally different. He said that the organization has no coordination with the teachers associations fully equipped with pros and cons issues pertaining to education sector in the province.

There is no exact record of the school children and those enrolled in the private schools as there are hundreds of private schools which are yet to be recognized by the government.

Needless to say, the collection of authentic, credible and officially confirmed data and then exploit it to draw conclusions on basis of exact statistics requires a proper network of human resources and that’s where the Alif Ailaan definitely lacks such formalities. A Ph.D scholar in education and principal of a private school at Malakand division, Dr Shahid Jalil remarked that education was the most pivotal indicator after the health in the Annual Development Fund (ADF) and relatively any fake or wrong assumptions about the data could create irrevocable loss on the horizon of education. The Ailf Ailaan lacks not only proper team in the province but represents poor information while sketching out separate ranking methodology of each district in the province, he argued.

“The government should be careful while granting no objection certificate to those non-government organizations working in education sector in the province,” he added. The Alif Ailaan uses Education Management Information System (EMIS) data as baseline for the framework of its ranking different districts. Strange enough, the government has not yet published its annual report for 2016 on the education but the organization has published its report after it has claimed to have obtained details from the government report. A school teacher in Malakand district, Sahidullah said that current education performance should not be compared with 2009-10 as made by the organization.

He said 80 percent population of Malakand district migrated to settled area in the province due to insurgency. He said that ranking and standard of education at the district has dropped for the last five years and the infrastructure of the schools has largely been affected by man-made and natural calamities as compared to 2001-2 there are more schools without boundary walls and other basic necessities.

The Ailf Ailaan generates two types of scores which mostly come under fire by the education department and government schools teachers.

First, an education outcome based rankings measure performance on access enrolment, learning test scores, retention survival rates up till Class-V and gender parity equity.

Second, measures performance on educational inputs, mainly the availability of basic school level infrastructure including boundary wall, drinking water, electricity, toilet and satisfactory building condition.

However, Alif Ailaan Campaign Manager Moiz Hussain said that the organization could not afford to access every district in the province and therefore, data collected by the government had been used for ranking and scoring education performance.

He said they had pinpointed loopholes in the education system of the province as per their capacity and the rest was the government responsibility to plug it and work on it. However, Moez accepted that Alif Ailaan did not have capacity to reach every school and child and create accurate statistic as mentioned in the published report Limitation Chapter of the published report.