Local bodies should be empowered for better education: Baral

Lalitpur, June 11: Khagaraj Baral, Secretary at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technologies (MoEST) said on Monday that the local bodies that had been sensitised about the School Improvement Plan (SIP) could make positive contribution in the education sector.

"Local bodies have full authority on basic and secondary education; therefore, they should be empowered. The federal government need not worry about basic education if the local bodies could learn about a better school management system," he said while speaking at the wrap-up seminar of the Project for Support for Improvement of School Management, Phase 2 (SISM2).

SISM2 (2013-18) was implemented in collaboration with the MoEST and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

The primary objective of the project is to manage all community schools nationwide through the SIP process for improving access to and quality of basic education.

According to Director General of the Department of Education Baburam Poudel, the seminar was organised to share experiences, good practices, lessons learned from the project to further promote quality education in the country.

Jun Sakuma, chief representative of JICA Nepal, stated that JICA would like to continuously commit its support to the education sector in Nepal as it believes that quality of basic education was not only a key to development and empowerment of each individual but also a corner stone of every development of a nation.

Major activities of SISM2 included capacity development trainings, national dissemination of SIP formulation, updating and evaluating of stakeholders at all levels – regional, district, resource centre and school.

The project also produced various training materials and distributed them to all public schools in Nepal. Community schools in Nepal recognise SIP as the core document for the improvement of school management and ultimately to improve the quality of education, said the Department of Education.

Promotion of SIP is one of the important strategic interventions, as stated in the School Sector Development Plan – 2015-2023.

Published in The Rising Nepal daily on 12 June 2018.