14,000 teachers to be imparted skill development in J&K

Tahir Mushtaq

JAMMU, Feb 14: Trying to improve the skills of the teachers, Education department will start special “skill development classes”, for nearly 14000 teachers in Jammu and Kashmir in next two months. Most of them will be trained through District Institute of Education and Training (DIETs) across the state.

Officials said that under the plan, special classes will be organised for the Government teachers to improve their subject skills. “It has become necessary as the level of education has fallen in most of the government schools in recent years. This all shows up in the annual result in the board examination”, said an official.

There are nearly 22,000 government teachers in the government sector alone.

“Apart from the training programme for the teachers we intent to provide free uniforms to the children to improve the enrollment in the institutions. The plan is already in place but it will be further expanded”, said a official.

There are nearly 13,000 schools across the state, but many of them are understaffed due to which the performance of children studying in these institutions has dipped in recent years in comparison to the private institutions.

“Though the private educational institutions give far less salary to their teachers, but skill wise they are more improved and know the needs of the present time. In case of government teachers, most of them have very casual approach towards the students”, said a senior official from the department.

Major worry for the government is student-teacher ratio, while the statistic are encouraging as the J&K has student-teacher ratio at 30:1 as against the national average of 43:1, but the major issue is performance of the students studying in government schools.

A official said that while in the urban schools, the ratio is as low as 20:1 in the remote villages of the state the ratio is nearly 60:1 and the government want to reduce this gap and improving the skills of the teachers is very important to compete with the private institutions. “Many of the primary schools are run by two teachers only and even in some cases by single teacher”, said a source.