Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) to start smart monitoring of schools for improving condition of schools following in the 36 districts of the Punjab province.

The latest evaluation by Programme Monitoring and Implementation Unit (PMIU) resulted in improved enrollment of students along with presence of teachers and accessibility of essential utilities.

Dr. Umar Saif Chairman PITB and Advisor to the Chief Minister Punjab has expressed his satisfaction over the benefits of the new monitoring mechanism while Terming its initiative, PMIU with the School Education Department. The system is efficient with real-time reporting with pictorial evidence, geotagging of sites visited, and automatic SMS alerts on below target performance.

The centralized dashboard providing access to combined information for analysis in a timely trend and help in decision making, he added. The School Education Department has hired 950 field officers for school monitoring layer for the Punjab’s Government.

Field officers are known as Monitoring and Evaluation Assistants (MEAs) will visit the 52,695 public schools across Punjab report stats together with student enrollment, teacher presence, and the accessibility of utilities, at the time of their visit every month.

District monitoring officers and PMIU re-assigns and shuffles schools to be visited by each MEA to maintain fairness and to discourage conspiracy, during different months. To ensure devotion to assigned schedules, PMIU regularly communicates with its field staff.

PITB to equip MEAs with SIM-enabled tablet-PCs, supporting their efforts to digitally submit forms in real-time, during their spot visits to schools with PMIU and the School Education Department. PMIUs 950 monitoring officers across all 36 districts of Punjab provided with Tablet-PCs containing school monitoring software application.

The School Education Department can instantly identify which MEA performed a particular spot-visit making staff timely accountable for the data that they submitted. During the last three years, the department has processed more than 1million spot-visits to public schools and analyzed via the tablet-PC application.

PMIU reviews and checks all visit activity via real-time, online reporting dashboard, with drill-down capability to access the actual form filled by the MEA during the spot visit. The system also sends automatic SMS alerts highlighting school with minimal compliance to the concerned district administration and officials of the School Education Department every evening.