KARACHI: Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah has said that education is the government`s top priority and as such a multipronged approach needs to be adopted to bring out-of-school children within the fold of quality education.

`The demands of the sector are tremendous and a lot needs to be done, that is why I have declared emergency in education sector in the province,` he added.

The chief minister said this while presiding over the Sindh Education Foundation`s board of governors` meeting at CM House on Thursday.

He appreciated the foundation`s performance and said that the public-private partnership needed to be structured to help the government reach out-ofschool children.

`Methodologies and implementation plans can be deliberated upon to tackle the issue of abandoned schools with the education department taking the lead and engaging the foundation as the key player in the education sector,` he said and directed Education Minister Jam Mehtab Dahar, education secretary Aziz Ugaili and the SEF managing director to explore the possibility of public-private partnership to functionalise 2,000 closed schools.

Earlier briefing the board, SEF MD Naheed Shah Durrani said the foundation, over the past few years, had expanded to over 506,511 students through a network of 2,100 schools.

She added that the foundation was gradually moving into post-primary portfolio and it had an enrolment of 80,000 students at post-primary level in elementary, secondary and high schools.

`The SEF has moved away from two-room/threeroom schools and now a small portfolio is of such schools whereas large segment of schools is six-room plus,` she said.

Referring to an initiative, `Teach for Change`, she apprised the board that 77 Teaching Support Associates on the model of `Teach for America` had been hired from prestigious institutions.

These young graduates would play their role as subject-specialised teachers and change agents in the foundation`s schools in f ar-flung areas of Sukkur, Hyderabad, Dadu, Mirpurkhas and Tharparkar regions in initial phase, she added.

The MD presented the revised budget of 2016-17 and budget estimate of 2017-18 before the board.

The participants in the meeting were apprised that in the outgoing year around 89 per cent of the budget was being spent on student fees and school development services, whereas the same was envisaged for the next fiscal year. The board approved service rules of the foundation and increase in salaries of SEF employees in line with annual budgetary increment of the government.