Come new academic session, all electoral constituencies across the country will have one technical public school each, where students can study five technical subjects from grade nine onwards. The new academic session commences in mid-April.

The government in the budget speech had announced its plan to establish one technical school in each of 240 constituencies. Currently, only 99 constituencies have such schools. As per the decision, the Department of Education (DoE) sought proposals from schools in 141 remaining constituencies to run technical education programmes.

The schools from the respective constituencies have already applied to the District Education Offices (DEOs) seeking permission. The DoE issuing a public notice on Thursday asked all the DEOs to evaluate the proposals after inspecting location and infrastructure of the concerned schools and report to respective Regional Education Directorate (RED) by February 13.

The RED will report to the DoE after evaluating the proposals. “The DoE will take the final decision after evaluating the feasibility study of the respective schools,” the notice has stated.

The schools can run either of five subjects—Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. Only schools which have minimum infrastructure to run programmes will get permission from the DoE. However, they will also get donations to set up labs and other infrastructure as required.

The government in 2013 started technical education programmes in secondary schools because it wanted to impart “soft” skills on various subjects to create human resources who will be equipped to join the labour market as technicians in future. The School Reform Programme envisioned that students from such

programmes will be able to join higher secondary

programmes immediately after completing high school. Around 3,300 students were selected from across the country to study technical subjects in five subject areas two years ago in 99 public schools across the country. Among them, a total of 3,256 students, including 1,246 girls, completed School Leaving Certificate examinations under technical category in June this year.