The School Education department has embarked on an exercise to rationalize the teaching staff in the twin cities of Jammu and Srinagar.
To begin with, the department is collecting the data about the teachers, and students enrolled in different schools in the two cities.
The move comes in wake of the direction passed by J&K Lieutenant Governor, GC Murmu to the department to ensure optimum teacher-student ratio in the government schools in order to improve quality of the education particularly at elementary level.
Principal Secretary School Education, Asgar Samoon on Thursday, in an official communication, instructed Director School Education of Kashmir and Jammu to provide details about the number of schools in the twin cities.
“The details of the number of students enrolled in each schools, number of teachers in each school with tenure should also be submitted to the administrative department,” the document reads.
Over the years, the department has faced criticism for posting “influential teachers” in the city schools. In some cases the teachers have not been shifted for the past more than 10 years from these schools in the Srinagar and Jammu cities though the transfer policy mandates that the teachers should be transferred after completing two to three years in a school.
The department has already relieved around 200 teachers who were deputed in office to handle non-teaching assignments and send them back to the schools.
Samoon said the teachers would be assigned to teach in the community level classes and ongoing online classes.
“We need to overhaul the entire system in the education department and make it IT enabled. We are also creating a separate education administrative service to focus on discipline, infrastructure, reforms in curriculum and for fast track modernization of the department,” he said.