Lahore: Government school teachers today staged a protest demonstration in Lahore against the provincial government’s decision to hand over schools to the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF) and Danish Schools Authority.
While addressing the protest rally on Thursday, Punjab Teachers Union (PTU) leaders said that the provincial government has decided to privatize over 5,500 educational institutions across the Punjab, which has sent a wave of consternation among the teachers.
The protesters said that through the privatisation of schools, the provincial government was sidestepping its responsibility to fix the broken education system at large, and address the grievances of the teachers in specific.
They said that if the government moved ahead with the proposed plan it would adversely affect the children studying at the public school as they would have to pay a tuition fee set by private administrators.
The PTU leaders said that they would not allow privatisation of educational institutions, which will render thousands of teachers jobless.
As part of the privatisation, the provincial government has handed over around 60 schools in Rawalpindi to hand the PEF as a pilot project to what the government claimed improve the standard of education public schools.
“The government would not hand over the land or the buildings of the selected schools to the private sector but just their administration,” an official claimed while requesting anonymity.