Fact-check: Punjab's recruitment of retired military personnel to monitor schools is not a new policy

Social media posts claiming that Punjab has introduced a new policy to recruit retired military personnel to monitor schools are misleading.

The Punjab Education Foundation has been hiring retired military personnel as monitoring officers since 2015.

Claim

On August 29, an account on X shared a graphic featuring a photograph of Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif. It carried the text: “The Punjab government has decided to have educational institutions monitored by retired military personnel.”

The account wrote in the accompanying caption: “Retired military personnel will be recruited as monitoring officers in 22 districts of Punjab. The recruitment will be on one-year contracts, with a monthly salary of Rs60,000, along with all other facilities and benefits as per the rules.”

At the time of writing, the post had been viewed 17,000 times.

Claims have also been shared on Facebook as well.

Fact

The recruitment of monitoring officers by the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF) is not a new policy and has been in place since 2015.

Malik Shoaib Awan, chairperson of the PEF, an autonomous government body tasked with improving the quality of education, told Geo Fact Check over the phone that the foundation’s recruitment policy was changed in 2025.

According to Awan, before the policy change, all monitoring officers hired by PEF were retired military personnel. Under the current policy, 70% of monitoring officers recruited by the foundation are ex-military personnel, while 30% are civilians.

Awan said PEF recently advertised vacancies for monitoring officers as the provincial government has outsourced more government schools to the foundation, taking the total number of schools under PEF’s monitoring to around 20,000.

“To monitor these new schools and ensure that the work was being carried out properly, we needed to hire new people,” he said.

Ehsan ul Haq, assistant director of communications at PEF, also confirmed the recruitment and shared a recruitment advertisement published by PEF in a local newspaper. The advertisement invited both retired military personnel and civilians to apply for monitoring officer positions.

Verdict: The viral posts therefore omit important context: while PEF is recruiting monitoring officers, the practice is not a new policy, and the foundation’s current recruitment policy includes civilians as well as retired military personnel.

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