Provision of Physical Facilities for Pre-Primary education in Public Schools of Punjab (Pakistan)

Early Childhood Education (ECE) is an emerging field worldwide as well as in Pakistan. The School Education Department of Punjab is making substantial efforts to spread ECE in its territory through Quaid-e-Azam Academy for Educational Development (QAED) . This study was aimed to evaluate the physical facilities of the Early Childhood Education (ECE) program in public schools of province Punjab. It was a quantitative study. A multistage sampling technique was applied for the selection of the sample. District Lahore, Okara, and Toba Tak Singh were selected purposively. These districts were divided into two strata based on the area (urban and rural). Meanwhile, each strata were further divided into two sub-stratum, i.e., boys schools and girls schools. Thus 50 schools from urban and 50 schools from rural were selected from each district by the application of simple random sampling techniques. The self-made checklist was applied for measuring the physical facilities of ECE in public schools. The checklist was also pretested in the pilot study. The reliability of the checklist was measured through Cronbach alpha value which was found 0.78. Quantitative data were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistical techniques. Results of this study indicated that there was presence of boundary wall, toilet, one ECE room, one ECE trained teacher, blackboard, chair per child in almost all schools but there was absence of three ECE rooms, three trained ECE teachers, presence of Care-giver, facility of first aid box, presence of ECE kit (provided by QAED) and standard decorated ECE rooms as per criteria of QAED. The results of comparison among districts show that Toba Tak Singh has a good provision of ECE as compared to Lahore and Lahore has more facilities of ECE as compared to Okara. Keywords: Early Childhood Education (ECE), Quaid-e-Azam Academy of Educational Development (QAED), Physical Facilities (PF)