LAHORE: As thousands of assistant education officers (AEOs) and secondary school educators (SSEs) have put up defiance outside the chief minister’s secretariat on The Mall for their regular job status, the government has also shown resistance to accept their demands. For the last seven days, AEOs and SSEs have been staging sit-in peacefully, demanding unconditional regularization of their services.
The only breakthrough came when Punjab Minister for Schools held a meeting with the representatives of AEOs and SSEs with an assurance that their issue would be resolved by April 9. The teachers, however, refused to leave the ground. It is pertinent to mention here that the protesting teachers have been demanding unconditional regularization of services of over 11,000 SSEs and AEOs across the province.
They demanded that regularization of their services should not be linked to the Punjab Public Service Commission (PPSC).
“The condition is unfair,” says Syed Jawad Kazim Gilani, one of the AEOs representatives from Muzaffargarh.
“We were recruited through a test and strict merit-based criteria in 2016 onward. We’ve brought about changes in the government’s mission for the provision of quality education. We only want a regular job status,” he said.
The schoolteachers had protested on several occasions in the past observing that over 11,000 SSEs and AEOs were upset because of delay in the regularisation of their services and they wanted unconditional regularisation as they were recruited purely on merit
