Punjab Government’s ambitious plans of maintaining electronic data of schools, students and teachers have apparently failed to take off. A substantial number of schools have not been e-filing the details including number of teachers, students, schools, and teachers’ attendance, among other things.
As a result, the State Government has decided to link all the schools in the State — Government, aided, and private — with the e-Punjab School portal. The portal would have the entire data of these schools — including the number of teachers, students, teachers’ daily attendance, building area, facilities available and other information on monthly basis.
For the purpose, the State Education Department has decided to identify “Nodal Schools” — the high and secondary schools having facilities of computer along with internet besides a highly trained staff in computer knowledge.
“It has been noticed that some schools are not updating the information on the e-portal regularly. To ensure that no school would adopt a careless attitude in updating the information on the portal, we have decided to identify the nodal schools,” a senior education department officer told The Pioneer.
The responsibility of the heads and in-charges of these nodal schools have been fixed to update the record and data of all the schools that come under them very month, the officer added.
The Government notification, issued by the state Director General School Education (DGSE) Pradeep Aggarwal in March, has asked all the District Education Officers (DEOs) to obtain a list of cluster schools from MIS (Management Information System) coordinator and identify suitable high and secondary schools to be selected as nodal schools.
Besides ensuring efficient facilities and staff, the DGSE has asked the officials concerned to ensure that all nodal schools have almost equal number of schools under them.
“Our main aim is to ensure that our e-portal show complete information, and the main head office and district level offices need not have to collect the figures,” said the officer.
Under the programme, the department has asked all the schools to give the name of the in-charge or head of the school, besides the name of the concerned person responsible for updating the record on portal.
“To main the data regularly, the schools have been asked to update the same every month. Besides, the schools concerned have been asked to give an online certificate every month confirming that the data thus updated have been checked and is correct,” said the officer.
At the same time, the notification made it clear that it would be the nodal schools’ responsibility to ensure that schools under it update the information regularly. “In case of failure of any school to timely update the information, the head of the nodal school can ask the concerned DEO to act,” it added.
The education officer added that neither the head office nor the district level office would gather the information regarding schools in future, and the data given on the portal would be considered for all purposes.