A number of events and seminars do take place relating to education sector throwing light on the infra-structure and shortcomings present here but there’s never a fruitful outcome of such seminars . The reason is : in events like that people / guests are more prone to make speeches over the particular issue and making false promises before the audience , both knowing that the outcome would be “nothing at all”. Moreover the guest speakers are mostly political figures and from aristocratic strata – not knowing the exact facts about the prevailing condition . Realizing this situation , SAEL arranged a “FOCUS GROUP” with teachers from different schools .The proposition behind it was , to provide a platform to them to speak freely about the various problems they face relating to students parents , curriculam , teaching methodologies and resources thus titling it : talking about teaching.

A number of other areas relating to teaching sector were also discussed :

• to ideantify teachers’ needs and expectations from the trainings in Pakistan.
• to analyse institution administrator’s views and attitude towards teacher training

The core issues of discussion were classroom management, communication and performance management. The discussion ended at a broad conclusion that teacher training is important to impart knowledge.

The discussion was, at one level, a kind of catharsis and outburst provided to the teachers . In the discussion , they mutually discussed about different hindrances and hurdles present in the system .At the same time , it also served SAEL , by giving ideas / propositions on various areas to be worked upon for teachers development . The workshop held on April 2-3 was a continuity of this teacher development programme . The idea /topics of the workshop : importance of sports in schools ,creative writing and classroom management were gathered from this focus group discussion.

The FOCUS GROUP proved functional not only to teachers but also for SAEL, helping in researching the sector to find and analyse various reasons for backwardness in education system.

The SAEL Movement has plans to arrange the FOCUS GROUP again in future exploring all possible channels of education at different levels involving all the stakeholders.