By Ali Imran
ISLAMABAD: Federal Minister for Education, Professional Training, National Heritage and Culture Shafqat Mahmood on Thursday inaugurated Pakistan Institute of Education (PIE) to serve for education data collection, consolidation, dissemination, education assessment, basic and applied research in education sector.
On the occasion, he said that education sector in Pakistan faced severe challenges related to educational policy making including Incomplete Data Coverage, Weak Institutional Setting, Lack of Data Quality Standards, Weak Coordination, SDG-4 Indicators, Data gaps related to learning losses and learning poverty, lack of linkages between research and policy formulation and implementation and Absence of competitive research regime.
The minister said, three years back he envisioned an institute with a clear mandate to guide policy analysis and resource allocations through data assessment, research and analysis to solve the issue of gap in federal level mandate to undertake a Country level education analysis and provide guidance on lagging areas.
He said working procedure in the government’s setup was more complicated as compare to private sector for instance a recruitment process in private sector takes a week while the same process in government would take six months.
The minister said that the dream was realized today and he wanted PIE to become the premier institution of the country in education sector.
He advised the senior officers of the ministry not to stop here but further move forward with same zeal and zest.
Federal Secretary Education Naheed Durrani said the PIE would work as a think tank on education assessment and learning outcomes as well as conduct basic and applied research on various aspects of education and building system capacity for data analytic, research and evidence-based policy and decision making.
