RAWALPINDI:
A high-level committee formed by order of the Rawalpindi Bench of the Lahore High Court has finalized recommendations for a province-wide academic calendar comprising 190 working days in schools and colleges across Punjab.
The proposals include reducing summer holidays from two and a half months to six weeks or one and a half months.
The committee held three meetings over the past four months and presented its joint recommendations at the third meeting. Under the new proposals, educational institutions across the province will observe a total of 175 holidays annually, while the total number of academic and teaching working days will be fixed at 190. All private school associations in Punjab have accepted the proposed framework.
Punjab School Education Department Special Secretary Muhammad Iqbal has directed PECTA and Director of Public Instruction (Secondary and Primary) to formulate a uniform academic calendar of 190 working days for educational institutions across Punjab within three days, in the light of the recommendations submitted by all members of the committee.
The committee noted that the continuous increase in vacations each year had been damaging the academic system, and that the study programs of senior classes were often left incomplete.
The committee was constituted by Justice Jawad Hassan on a writ petition filed in the Lahore High Court in Rawalpindi against the unnecessary increase in vacations in educational institutions in Punjab.
The third meeting of the committee, constituted under the chairmanship of Secretary School Education, was held in Lahore under the leadership of Punjab Special Secretary School Education Muhammad Iqbal.
Participants included former Punjab provincial education minister and Pakistan Education Council chairman Mian Imran Masood, APSMA central president Kashif Adeeb Javedani, North Punjab president Abrar Ahmad Khan, representatives of major private school chains, Pakistan Chamber of Education president Ali Raza and a deputy attorney general.
Participants expressed serious concern about the increase in summer vacations and the recent winter vacations, noting that the academic process could have been maintained through adjustments to school hours, which was not done.
APSMA president Abrar Ahmad Khan said educational institutions in Islamabad were only given 10 days of winter vacation, while in neighboring Rawalpindi, despite better weather conditions, they were given a full month of vacation, which he termed as excessive.
The meeting proposed a 190-day educational work calendar for schools and colleges of Punjab.
