PEN to be made mandatory for students from academic year 2024-25

The School Education Department in the State has made mandatory the use of Permanent Education Number (PEN) from the academic year 2024-25. PEN is a unique identification number assigned to every student provided by the Union Ministry of Education, through the UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education Plus) portal that covers more than 14.89 lakh schools, 95 lakh teachers and 26.5 crore children.

Commissioner, Andhra Pradesh School Education, S. Suresh Kumar said that implementation of PEN would pave the way for streamlining and simplifying the process of the students’ transition from one school to the other in the new academic year.

He said it had been found that when students changed their school, especially in Classes 2, 5 , 7 or 8, their transition to the new school was not smooth, as the headmasters insisted on documents like record sheet, transfer certificate, caste, birth and other certificates, resulting in hardships to the parents and delay in the migration process. Sometimes, children even dropped out of school in the process.

The Commissioner said the District Education Officers (DEOs) had been asked to map the students to the school they wanted to migrate to and their mapped data would automatically get transferred to the new school from the State headquarters.

He said a detailed report on schools/students where the next higher classes were not available, had been prepared and made available to the district and mandal education officers through the student info portal. These officers should constitute special teams to ensure smooth transition of students, he said.

In the new system, said Mr. Suresh Kumar, after a student’s transfer to the opted school, an SMS alert/welcome message would be sent to the parents. He said as all the documents were being digitised while admitting the students in Class 1, only the child ID (Aadhaar) and Number (PEN) would be needed subsequently. He also wanted the officials to open Digilocker accounts for all students, right from Class 1.

Mr. Suresh Kumar said the DEOs should complete the task of students’ transition to new schools by April 23.

The department had also fixed a time-frame for the officials to process applications of private unaided schools seeking permission for recognition or renewal of their institutions.

The Mandal Education Officers and Deputy Education Officers had been asked to take not more than 30 days to clear the applications from the date of receiving them, the Assistant Directors in the office of DEOs and the DEOs and the Regional Directors of Schools would get seven days each to clear the applications.