Dhaka: Finance Minister AMA Muhith placed Tk 4,64,573 crore budget for the 2018-19 fiscal year in Parliament on Thursday.

The minister presented budget for education sector in his speech.

He proposed to allocate a total of Tk. 53,054 crore for of the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education, Secondary and Higher Education Division, and Technical and Madrasa Education Division of the Ministry of Education.

This is the second highest allocation in next fiscal year for any particular sector.

Primary education

Claiming the ruling government has made significant progress in promoting primary education, the minister said, ‘Now we want to focus on providing education supportive of bringing about fundamental changes in living standard and to creating better learning environment at schools.

‘The curriculum of primary education should be developed to accommodate these values and training to make it suitable for children. To cope with the increasing demand, we will broaden the remit of ongoing programmes such as proving stipends, distribution of free textbooks and logistics, school feeding and so on. In tandem with this, 7,000 primary schools with separate wash blocks for boys and girls to ensure better environment for education; 65,000 classrooms, 10,500 teachers’ rooms, boundary walls in 5,000 schools will be constructed and 30,000 pieces of sports-goods will be distributed. As follow up previous programmes, we will establish another 1,000 primary schools in areas without schools. To ensure the provision of technology-based modern education system, ICT-based community learning centre will be set up in all unions and some selected towns. We have a plan to set up 64 livelihoods and lifelong learning centres in 64 districts.’

Secondary education

The minister claimed the merit-based assessment at the secondary level, highest use of technology in education programmes, promotion of science education, and improvement in the quality of education are currently getting priority and will continue to receiving such priority in future. ‘We are creating admission opportunities for around 2,00,000 students in 200 government colleges through a project titled ‘Expansion of Opportunity for Science Education in Government Colleges’ and for around 3,29,000 students in 323 secondary schools through ‘Development of Government Secondary School’ project’ the minister said.

‘To ensure confidentiality in making question papers, we are trying to make a ‘Question Bank’ through integrated efforts of all education boards.’

Technical and vocational education

Mentioning that Bangladeshi labourers for their skill deficiency do not get reasonable wages abroad, the minister said, ‘Thus flow of remittance is comparably low in proportion to the number of migrant workers. In fact, modern and forward looking madrasa education in the long run can play a catalytic role in gaining employment opportunities in Arab countries including Middle-East.

Bearing this in mind, importance has been attached to the extension of employment-friendly technical and vocational education to generate interest in this kind of education while modernising the madrasa education.

‘We have taken initiatives to set up one technical school and college in each of 100 upazila and technical training centres in remaining 389 upazilas’, the minister added.