ISLAMABAD - Declaring year 2011 as Year of Education, Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani Wednesday said that the 'education for all target was yet another challenge, which required collective efforts across the political and social divide. The Prime Minister was chairing a special meeting on education system and planning in under developed areas, here at the PM House. The Prime Minister said that the year 2011 had been declared as Year of Education keeping in view the fact that education was key to the resolution of multiple challenges being faced by the country. Article 25-A of the Constitution enjoins upon the state to provide free and compulsory education to all children aged between 5 to 16 years which makes this task a shared responsibility between the federal and the provincial governments, he added. The Prime Minister said that although education was specifically the responsibility of the provincial governments, it would be helpful that the recommendations prepared by the National Education Task Force be given due weight-age by the provinces in their Education Improvement Programmes. The Prime Minister stressed upon the need for preparing complete and accurate data of public and private educational institutions particularly in the under-developed areas of the country to help assess the needs of missing facilities and requirements of trained teachers. He also called upon for developing some methods for the accountability of the performance of the educational institutions as well as the teaching staff at district level. The targets for achieving literacy rate for each Tehsil, he said, needs to be fixed in order to achieve the millennium development goals by the year 2015. He also suggested that special programmes needed to be developed for teachers training and their capacity building in specialised subjects. The government had prepared a comprehensive National Educational Policy 2009 in consultation with the federating units and other stakeholders, he said and added, The policy has set the goals of raising the annual budgetary allocations for the sector to seven per cent of the GDP and increasing literacy to 85 per cent by 2015. In this regard, focused attention of all the stakeholders, he said, would be essential. Earlier, Begum Shahnaz Wazir Ali, Co-Chairperson of Pakistan Education Task Force briefed the Prime Minister on the state of education in the under-developed regions of the country including Southern Punjab. While underlining the importance of education for national development, she emphasised that involvement of political and social leadership is essential to address the issue of illiteracy leading to miscellaneous challenges. In her briefing, she mentioned that only 33 per cent of children went to schools in various under-developed regions of the country. In most of these areas, she said, the teacher-student ratio was imbalanced while the infrastructure school buildings were either not available or inappropriate for proper schooling.