Skewed’ PTR led to closure of many Govt Schools: Alok Kumar

Srinagar, Jun 10: Administrative Secretary School Education Department Alok Kumar Monday said that the Pupil Teacher Ratio (PTR) in government schools was skewed that led to closure of many such schools with ‘extremely low student ‘enrollment’.

 Speaking to the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) during the sidelines of capacity building workshop for resources persons under PM SHRI Scheme, Kumar said, “In some schools we had two or three students and we had kept five teachers posted there wherein I think it was not optimum utilization of our resources.”

“The Pupil Teacher Ratio (PTR) in the schools of Jammu and Kashmir was very skewed. “Reduction of schools has nothing to do with the quality of education,” he said. On asking about the closure of more than 4,000 government schools in the year 2023, Kumar said, “Those schools didn’t have much student enrollment and the infrastructure in terms of human resources got spread out.” 

He further said in the workshop, there were many resource persons from NCERT and other major institutions who are training our master trainers. 

“In this workshop, we are trying to disseminate the information and expertise to the master trainers who will go back to their respective institutions wherein they train the other teachers and instruct the students accordingly,” he said. 

Kumar said, “I am happy to know that many schools in Jammu and Kashmir are launching a coding program. In the AI driven world, it is very important to have coding programs in our schools.”

Speaking about the quality of education, Kumar said that the recent results of 12th standard was evident of the quality of education in the schools of Jammu and Kashmir. He however said that “Many of our schools don’t have adequate infrastructure. We need to progress.” 

The workshop was attended by the officers of the education department here at Conference hall in Alama Iqbal Library University of Kashmir—(KNO)