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recruitment and reduced political interference (for instance through independent testing and
giving District Management Officers (DMOs) greater authority in selecting teachers and shifting
recruitment processes to local levels to reduce deployment imbalances. With permanent
contracts being cited as a critical factor resulting in low teacher effort and poor incentives, the
Punjab government experimented with contract hiring between 2002 and 2008. ‘Following a
complete ban on teacher hiring between 1997 and 2002, new teachers were recruited only on a
contract basis. The minimum qualification requirement was also raised to a Bachelors degree (a
shift from 12 years of education and a college degree compared to the earlier 10 years of
education and a high school degree). The policy was designed primarily to introduce high-stakes
accountability by linking contract termination to unsatisfactory performance, and to induct
better qualified teachers (Habib, 2010). Habib (2010) in her study suggests that the contract
terms, specifically those relating to transfers and leave options, led to dissatisfaction among
hired contract teachers. Lower salaries and greater workloads de-motivated these teachers and
led to high absenteeism. Further, political pressure inevitably led to the regularization of these
contract teachers, making the contract terms defunct. Hence, the contract policy had a limited
impact on teacher absenteeism and accountability. The dismissal clauses in the contracts of
teachers hired in 2003 onwards were revoked as a result of judicial action and political pressure.
It should be noted that the role of teacher unions or collective action by other teachers in these
developments has not been clearly documented. Other provinces have also experimented with
the contract teacher policy with questionable success. Newspaper accounts demonstrate severe
dissatisfaction of contract teachers with pay and work conditions.
Another example of a teacher-based reform that has been initiated in 3 of the 4 provinces (Sindh
in 2012, Punjab in 2013 and KP (2015), is aimed at independent teacher tests as pre-requisites
for merit-based recruitment. The National Testing Service (NTS) is an independent privately
owned testing service which is being contracted by the government in Pakistan to administer
tests for a broad range of posts across a number of government departments. The test aims to
assess teachers’ content knowledge rather than pedagogy (with the latter being identified as
particularly weak) and there do not appear to be many evaluations of this intervention for the
country.
Whilst historically teacher-hiring has been at the provincial level (the selection for province
wide teaching posts from a pool of teachers applying from all districts happens at the provincial
level), recent reforms have aimed to shift recruitment towards local hiring which is aimed at
reducing political interference within the recruitment process. ‘A semi-ethnographic study by
Bari et al. (2013) on teacher deployment and transfer practices in Punjab revealed that a
majority of transfer requests were regarding moving closer to hometowns, particularly by
female teachers.
There have also been efforts to reform pre-service training in the country with much of the
impetus on this initiative coming from donors and international development partners. Aslam
et al. (2016) note that among the notable reforms in this area are the ones supported by UNESCO
and USAID under the Strengthening Teacher Education in Pakistan (STEP) project which helped
develop the National Professional Standards for Teachers and influenced policy
recommendations for teacher education which ultimately fed into the National Education Policy
(NEP) 2009 (ibid, p. 32). However, whilst these efforts have resulted in the development of new
programs, the older certificate-based programs continue to be offered by some institutions. A
more recent reform has introduced a cluster approach to teacher training as an efficient and
cost-effective means of providing in-service. This was institutionalized by the Directorate of
Staff Development (DSD) in the Punjab in 2004 and these clusters form the backbone of the in-