Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) government has announced plans to fill vacant teaching positions and introduce a digital attendance system in schools as part of wider efforts to improve the education sector. Minister for Elementary and Secondary Education Engineer Umair Naeem Advocate chaired a meeting on Friday, where officials discussed recruitment, school monitoring and administrative reforms. The meeting directed the department to identify vacant posts for senior general line and science teachers, headmasters, computer instructors and subject specialists, and to refer them to the Public Service Commission (PSC). Officials were also asked to determine the relevant quotas so that staff shortages can be addressed in a structured way. The department will speed up recruitment against various teaching cadres under the departmental quota and will make regular and ad hoc appointments under the existing rules, which is intended to reduce the gaps that affect classrooms in different parts of the territory. Schools without enough teachers often struggle to cover all subjects, and filling these posts is expected to give students more consistent instruction.
The digital attendance plan forms the second major part of the announcement. Under the plan, the Education Management Information System (EMIS) will first install its attendance application in 50 primary schools in each district within 15 days, giving the department an early view of how the system works in practice before it is applied more widely. The department aims to extend the system to all educational institutions across AJK by March 2027. A digital record of attendance makes it easier for education officials to see which schools are functioning normally and which have problems with absent staff, and it reduces reliance on paper registers that are slow to collect and difficult to check from a distance. For a region with many schools in remote and hilly areas, a system that reports attendance electronically can also help the administration act on issues without waiting for physical inspections.
The meeting also reviewed the use of biometric attendance devices, which have already been installed in schools. Officials were directed to make all 1,900 installed devices fully operational within seven days, since devices that are present but not working do not give the department the data it needs. The meeting further called for the immediate installation of the attendance application in the remaining 200 schools, so that coverage is completed in places where the system has not yet been set up. Together, the biometric devices and the EMIS application are expected to give the department more than one way to record attendance and to confirm that teachers and staff are present at their posts.
By combining recruitment with better monitoring, the government is trying to address two common problems in public schools at once, namely the shortage of qualified staff and the difficulty of tracking whether existing staff are present. The directions given at the meeting set short deadlines for several steps, including the fifteen day target for the first set of primary schools and the seven day deadline for the biometric devices, and they point to a final goal of full coverage by March 2027. How quickly the department can meet these targets will decide how soon parents, teachers and students in AJK begin to see the effect of the reforms in their schools.
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