PAKISTAN’S EDUCATION SYSTEM
Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world. Population pressures and democratic and religious demands have put the present education system under great strain. Education planners and administrators are striving to cope with these challenges. The 18th amendment of the Pakistani Constitution transfers the responsibility for education from the federal government to states and provinces. National education policy enacted in 2017 has been designed according to this structure. [Source: Muhammad Shakeel, Syed Zulfiqar Shah, Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, Islamabad, TIMSS, 2019]
Education is almost completely decentralized, with province and area education departments responsible for the education system, from planning to implementation. The federal government has a limited role. The Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training is facilitating and coordinating among the province and area education departments to maintain coherence in education policies. In this regard, after a gap of 10 years, a national curriculum is in development in consultation with provincial and area education departments.
Pakistan’s education system is distributed into four level of educations: 1) Elementary education; 2) Secondary education; 3) Higher secondary education; 4) Tertiary education. Free primary education is a constitutional right and is compulsory in every province except Balochistan. Education is compulsory for all children from age 5 to 16 (in the mid 2000s it was only five years). The education system is designed for 12 years of schooling, with five years in primary school, three in middle school, and four in high school. After two years of basic secondary school students that want to continue on choose between a two-year higher secondary program or a two-year technical school.
In Pakistan, about 60 percent of students enrolled in school attend public schools, while the remaining 40 percent of students attend private schools. Public school students mostly come from a low socioeconomic background while private school students mostly have middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Public sector institutions are required to teach the national curriculum. Private sector institutions may teach different types of curriculum, including the Oxford, Cambridge, and Singapore curricula.
According to the “World Education Encyclopedia”: “Basically, there are two systems of education prevalent in Pakistan: the traditional religion-based education system and the modern formal education system begun under British colonial rule and continued after the country's independence. Both systems are financed by the ministry of education, although the scrutiny by the government of standards in the modern education sector is far stricter than for the madrassahs. Since the late 1970s, with the increasing Islamization of Pakistan's polity and society, the management of the traditional institutions has been streamlined both at the provincial and the federal levels by the mullahs. This was partly helped by the fact that the madrassahs were financed out of the zakat, the Islamic tithe collected by the government. [Source: “World Education Encyclopedia”, The Gale Group Inc. 2001]
Structure of Pakistan’s Education System
Education is organized into five levels: primary (grades one through five); middle (grades six through eight); high (grades nine and ten, culminating in matriculation); intermediate (grades eleven and twelve, leading to an F.A. diploma in arts or F.S. science; and university programs leading to undergraduate and advanced degrees. Preparatory or preprimary classes (kachi, or nursery, literally, unripe) were formally incorporated into the system in 1988 with the Seventh Five-Year Plan. [Source: Peter Blood, Library of Congress, 1994 *]
According to the “World Education Encyclopedia”: The modern educational system comprises the following five stages: The primary stage lasting five years, applicable to children from 5- to 9-years-old; a middle stage of three years for children 10- to 12-years-old, covering grades six through eight; a two-year secondary, or "matriculation" stage (grades nine and ten), for children 13- and 14-years-old; a two-year higher secondary, or "intermediate college," leading to an F.A. diploma in arts or F.S. in science; and a fifth stage covering college and university programs leading to baccalaureate, professional, and master's and doctorate degrees. [Source: “World Education Encyclopedia”, The Gale Group Inc. 2001]
“The two major stages in the pre-university period are marked by primary and secondary schooling for 10 years leading up to the Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSCE), and an additional two years in higher secondary school or college leading to the Higher Secondary Certificate Examination (HSCE). The SSC and the HSC examinations are conducted by the Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education. It is the stage at which most of the brightest students take up medicine, engineering, pharmacy, dentistry, or architecture. There is a special public examination at the end of grade eight for those wishing to apply for government scholarships. The participation rate falls from 58 percent at the primary stage to 36 percent at the middle three-year stage, to 22.5 percent at the SSCE level, and to a precipitately low of 7.3 percent at the HSCE stage.
“Those who prefer technical education enroll after SSCE into one of the "intermediate" colleges offering technical and vocational education, or they enroll in one of the numerous technical institutes run by provincial departments of education. A separate board examines students of technology and awards certificates to those who pass the examination.
“While most students take the three-year course in college leading to the bachelor's degree, students aiming at a professional degree in medicine, engineering, architecture, or pharmacy join the appropriate professional colleges after the HSCE. The duration of study leading to the professional degrees varies. While the bachelor's degree in medicine (MBBS or Bachelor in Medicine and Bachelor in Surgery), requires five and one-half years including one year of internship, a degree in engineering, architecture, pharmacy, or veterinary medicine requires four years. The participating rate in the bachelor's degree or professional degree courses is a meager 2.8 percent.
“Graduate education, known as "postgraduate" education, is available at the universities and some institutions of higher learning "deemed" to be universities. A master's degree would require two years, while the Ph.D., taken in almost all cases after the master's (theoretically an option exists to take it after the bachelor's), takes two to three years of additional work involving a thesis or doctoral dissertation.
Bureaucracy and Planning of Pakistan’s Education System
According to the “World Education Encyclopedia”: “Education at all levels falls primarily under the jurisdiction of the provincial governments. However, the federal government has, throughout the history of Pakistan, taken a leadership role in devising a national policy of education and research. Moreover, all universities, centers of excellence, and area study centers are funded by the federal government through the University Grants Commission. The federal Ministry of Education is headed by the minister of education, assisted by the education secretary, who is a senior member of the bureaucracy. The provincial education departments are likewise headed by the education ministers assisted by education secretaries in charge of separate divisions such as primary, secondary, vocational, and higher education. The provinces are divided into regions and districts for administrative purposes. Primary education at the district level is administered by a district education officer, while secondary education is headed in each region by a regional director. The colleges in each province are under the administrative control of a Directorate of Education located in the provincial capital. [Source: “World Education Encyclopedia”, The Gale Group Inc. 2001]
Academic and technical education institutions are the responsibility of the federal Ministry of Education, which coordinates instruction through the intermediate level. Above that level, a designated university in each province is responsible for coordination of instruction and examinations. In certain cases, a different ministry may oversee specialized programs. Universities enjoy limited autonomy; their finances are overseen by a University Grants Commission, as in Britain. [Source: Peter Blood, Library of Congress, 1994 *]
Teacher-training workshops are overseen by the respective provincial education ministries in order to improve teaching skills. However, incentives are severely lacking, and, perhaps because of the shortage of financial support to education, few teachers participate. Rates of absenteeism among teachers are high in general, inducing support for community-coordinated efforts promoted in the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1993-98).
In 1991 there were 87,545 primary schools, 189,200 primary school teachers, and 7,768,000 students enrolled at the primary level, with a student-to-teacher ratio of forty-one to one. Just over one-third of all children of primary school age were enrolled in a school in 1989. There were 11,978 secondary schools, 154,802 secondary school teachers, and 2,995,000 students enrolled at the secondary level, with a student-to- teacher ratio of nineteen to one.
Primary school dropout rates remained fairly consistent in the 1970s and 1980s, at just over 50 percent for boys and 60 percent for girls. The middle school dropout rates for boys and girls rose from 22 percent in 1976 to about 33 percent in 1983. However, a noticeable shift occurred in the beginning of the 1980s regarding the postprimary dropout rate: whereas boys and girls had relatively equal rates (14 percent) in 1975, by 1979 — just as Zia initiated his government's Islamization program — the dropout rate for boys was 25 percent while for girls it was only 16 percent. By 1993 this trend had dramatically reversed, and boys had a dropout rate of only 7 percent compared with the girls' rate of 15 percent.
The Seventh Five-Year Plan envisioned that every child five years and above would have access to either a primary school or a comparable, but less comprehensive, mosque school. However, because of financial constraints, this goal was not achieved.
In drafting the Eighth Five-Year Plan in 1992, the government therefore reiterated the need to mobilize a large share of national resources to finance education. To improve access to schools, especially at the primary level, the government sought to decentralize and democratize the design and implemention of its education strategy. To give parents a greater voice in running schools, it planned to transfer control of primary and secondary schools to NGOs. The government also intended to gradually make all high schools, colleges, and universities autonomous, although no schedule was specified for achieving this ambitious goal.
Problems with Pakistan’s Education System
Pakistan has a dysfunctional, xenophobic and anti-girl education system. Girls attend separate schools than boys at both primary and secondary levels. Less girls attend school than boys. Many children of both sexes don’t attend classes and ghost schools are a problem. By one estimate more than 20 million children out of school. For many families children are necessary to work the fields and help with chores and duties and schooling is not really an option. Weakness in public the education system has paved the way for conservation Islamic schools (madrassahs) to take hold. In the North West Frontier and Balochistan state schools have begun to resemble madrassahs, Even the state education system in Pakistan seeds with pro-jihad ideas.
Shahrukh Wani wrote in The Guardian: “Even if enrollment drives are able to get students into schools, evidence shows that only one in four children who enroll in the first grade remains in school by the 10th grade. Even of those students who remain in school, most aren’t learning basic skills like literacy. Studies have shown that over half of all 3rd graders, children aged 9-10, in government schools are illiterate.” [Source: Shahrukh Wani, The Guardian, June 27, 2017 Shahrukh Wani is an Islamabad-based policy blogger.]
Spending more money doesn’t necessarily bring benefits. “Take for example, Sindh, Pakistan’s second largest province. In 2016, the province spent 12 times more on teacher salaries than it did in 2010; despite this increase the majority of its fifth graders can’t read a 2nd-grade level text. Ironically, Sindh’s provincial government has itself admitted that as many as 40 percent of its schoolteachers are ghost employees, meaning that these teachers don’t show up for work, and in some cases they don’t live in the towns where they are posted to teach. But the same teachers keep getting pay rises. Unsurprisingly, this toxic combination of political patronage and ineffective policies has seen a decline in net school enrollment rate in the province. Parents rightly ask what’s the benefit for them in sending their children to school when the children are unlikely to learn? Especially when these children are economically more beneficial for families when they are working.”
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center: “What makes “Pakistan’s Education Crisis” particularly troubling is that it exacerbates many of the country’s other problems. The uneducated masses complicate efforts to groom qualified experts to effectively address Pakistan’s many public policy challenges. Additionally, young people without sufficient education have trouble getting jobs and can become desirable recruitment targets for militant groups.” [Source: “Pakistan’s Education Crisis”, Woodrow Wilson Center, July 2016 ==]
Early Divisions and Exclusiveness of the Pakistani School System
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center: Pakistan had initially tried to find common ground and unify the country after independence “but its leaders failed to construct an inclusive political vision. An education conference in 1947 broke down in a debate over which language to teach in schools. Some advocated for Urdu and Arabic while Sindhis and Bengalis preferred their mother tongue. The decision was postponed and has not been taken up again at the national level. [Source: “Pakistan’s Education Crisis”, Woodrow Wilson Center, July 2016 ==]
“The country eventually came upon a more exclusive vision for education that stressed religious ideology. The earliest education policy, formulated in 1959 by the “Sharif Commission” under Ayub Khan’s military government, stressed the need to create a homogenous national identity based on Islam. This document has had a sustained influence on Pakistan’s education system — a Magna Carta for Pakistan’s education policy. Successive governments became more ideological. Increased Islamicization of the system in the 1980s coincided with the growth of private schooling and a preference for international high school qualifications through the Cambridge system over the national metric system. ==
“According to Haris Gazdar, Senior Researcher at the Collective for Social Science Research: “The military and political elites have imposed an unviable model of the nation state. With every new cultural experiment, there is a wave of withdrawal from the system. The only agreement we have now is that everyone can do what they want. The Taliban is closing girls schools but they are also okay with people fleeing. Almost everyone is willing to let you go.” When one group tries to impose their vision over another, we get violence: “Then, we didn’t blow up schools and shoot people over what they thought about education. Now, we do,” he finishes. ==
Education and Language in Pakistan
Each of Pakistan’s four provinces — Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — and the federally administered areas have their own school systems. They are also the traditional homelands of specific ethnic groups, which have their own languages: Punjabi in Punjab, Sindhi in Sindh, Balochi in Balochistan and Pashto in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, There are public and private schools in Pakistan including those with English, Sindhi or Urdu as their medium of instruction. In the province of Sindh, schools also have the option of Sindhi as a medium of instruction
Anjum Halai of Aga Khan University said: Pakistan is a linguistically diverse country with approximately 57 languages spoken throughout the country. Urdu is the national language and the lingua franca less although than 10% of the population speaks it natively. Urdu is the language of instruction in government schools and in low-fee paying private schools, while English is the medium of instruction in elite private schools and institutions of the federal government. [Source: “TIMSS 2019 Pakistan; Where to Next.”Anjum Halai, Aga Khan University, Pakistan, International Mathematics Symposium, January 2021]
“Language plays a crucial role in cognition and communication. The percentage of students in the sample from Pakistan who reported speaking the language of the test at home is noted. Fourth Grade Students in Pakistan who Speak the Language of the Test at Home: Always (22 percent); Almost always (10 percent); Sometimes (32 percent); Never (36 percent).
Results of TIMSS2019 showed that about two-thirds of students (63 percent) at fourth grade, on average, reported “always” speaking the language of the test at home, and most of the remaining students (32 percent) at fourth grade reported speaking it “almost always” or “sometimes.” There was relatively little variation in average achievement across these categories. However, the few students (5 percent) at fourth grade, on average who “never” spoke the language of the test at home had much lower average achievement in mathematics.
Education in Pashtun Areas
The Pashtuns (Pathans) are an ethnic group that live in western and southern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan and whose homeland is in the valleys of Hindu Kush. Many Pashtun have traditionally been — and still are — illiterate Schooling is often provided by madrassas. In the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan and Balochistan there are boys and girls schools in almost in every village and government colleges in every town. The government of Pakistan has established numerous schools in these areas — including ones devoted exclusively to girls — in an effort to imbue Pashtuns with a sense of Pakistani nationalism.
Girls have a legal right to attend school and feminist groups led by Marian Bibi are involved in opening up school for women. They has a been lot of resistance as the case of Malala getting shot in the head illustrates. As one women activist was setting up schools one mullah was quoted by Newsweek as saying, “Don’t allow these wayward women to enter your villages. If you see one of them, just take her home and forcible marry her.”
According to the “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life”: “Traditionally, education took place in religious institutes and mosque schools (madrassa or maktab). In addition to these institutions, free secular education was available in most villages, at least prior to 2001. In Afghanistan, the entire educational system was disrupted due to Russian invasion in 1978, and since the pullout in 1989 to 1992, due to the civil war. During the period of Taliban control (1996-2001), education was again restricted to religious institutions, and girls were not allowed to attend school. Since the Taliban were removed from power, many schools have been rebuilt, and many girls have returned to school. However, schools that allow girls are often targeted by the Taliban insurgency. These problems tend to affect Pashtuns greatly, as they make up the majority of the population in those areas most threatened by the insurgency. [Source: revised by M. Kerr, “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life”, Cengage Learning, 2009 *]
Sindh’s Awful Education System
According to the “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life”: Though Sindhi literacy (56 percent) is higher than the Pakistani average (50 percent for Pakistanis over 15 years of age), Sindhis still face problems in education typical of the country as a whole. In rural areas, children must work in the fields, the school drop-out rate is high, and there is a Muslim antipathy to education for females. Literacy among males in rural areas is 39 percent but among women it is only 13 percent. However, urban males have the highest literacy in the country, with that in Karachi being over 90 percent, and reaching 100 percent amongst communities, such as the Parsis. Among the elite, education — even of daughters — is seen as a matter of prestige and a means of political power. For example, Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, was educated at Harvard and Oxford. Sindh University, located in Hyderabad, and Karachi University are the major academic centers in the province. [Source: D. O. Lodrick “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life”, Cengage Learning, 2009 *]
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center Sindh is Pakistan’s most patronage-wracked province where corruption is a part of every transaction, from securing a teaching appointment to getting an authorization letter to form a parent teacher committee. Rural areas suffer from feudalism, intense poverty, and active criminal gangs in certain parts. The current education secretary has said that 40 percent of the teachers in the province are ghosts and 40 percent of schools are closed. A district official doing an informal survey of a sample of schools one morning in Jacobabad district in Northern Sindh reported 70 percent of schools to be closed. [Source: “Pakistan’s Education Crisis”, Woodrow Wilson Center, July 2016 ==]
The Department for International Development (DFID, the U.K.’s main development organization) decided not to work with the provincial government in 2012 because they questioned the political sincerity of the government in pursuing reform: “Given political uncertainties about the depth of the government’s commitment to reform and the lack of a comprehensive plan for the education sector, we do not believe it is feasible to fund the government directly…. Nor are we confident that we can achieve sufficiently rapid impact for Sindh’s out-of-school children through the provision of additional funding.”
By one estimate in the mid 2010s “40 percent of all teachers are ghosts. One staffer estimated that there are still 30,000 to 40,000 ghost teachers in the system, and that most of them protected themselves from termination by using political connections or bribes.” Reforms have been hard to make. “In the first three years of the reform program from 2008 to 2011, the education secretary changed nine times. Short terms in the post can mean a lack of accountability, discontinuity of reforms, and a disproportionate focus on profiteering.
Efforts to Improve Pakistan’s Education
According to “Cities of the World”: “The government of Pakistan works continuously to improve the quality of the country's educational system, but reform efforts are hampered by lack of financial resources and qualified personnel, outdated instructional materials and techniques, and a reluctance among some elements of Pakistani society to participate fully in the education of the nation's youth. In general, education is controlled by the provincial governments, with strong inputs from the Federal government. [Source:”Cities of the World”, The Gale Group Inc., 2002]
According to the “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Nations”: The education system is poor, notwithstanding a massive educational reform announced in 1972 and aimed at providing free and universal education through the 10th year of formal schooling for both boys (by 1983) and girls (by 1987). As an initial step, private educational institutions at all levels were nationalized. Additional steps included a reform of the curriculum away from general education and in favor of agricultural and technical subjects, equality of access to formal schooling for low-income groups and females, financial aid programs for poor students, and broad expansion and improvement of higher-level facilities. Curriculum bureaus were set up at federal and provincial levels, and the National Council of Education was established to formulate and evaluate educational development policy. [Source: “Worldmark Encyclopedia of Nations”, Thomson Gale, 2007]
In 2001 the government announced plans to institute universal primary education by 2010 and 78 percent literacy by 2011. However, more than 50 percent of the funds for this initiative are expected to come from international donors. [Source: Library of Congress, February 2005]
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center: “Public awareness is necessary, to keep reforms on track. Interestingly, reforms in Punjab and KP today are supply-driven by the governments. A public debate — internationally and in domestic media — that is relevant to the state of play today will help keep reforms on course and overcome special interests like teachers unions that are resisting, especially in Sindh. The “double the budget” mantra is overly simplistic, to the point of being misleading. It has probably gotten the education budget to increase to the current level of 17 percent to 28 percent of provincial budgets, but it is time now to focus on how the money is being used and misused.” ==
Some improvements have been made with better monitoring under a strategy “deliverology.” “Between October 2015 and November 2015, there was an average 4 percent improvement in students’ average scores across subjects. The data also shows that two of the three lowest performing districts in Punjab in April and May 2015 — Rajanpur and Rawalpindi — became the highest performers in math within four months. The third, Sialkot, has remained at the bottom. “According to Ali Inam, a consultant on Punjab’s reforms:“While Punjab is ahead of Sindh and KP in terms of education reforms, there are still concerns on validity of data used for policy analysis. There is a high incentive to fake progress due to quarterly review led directly by the Chief Minister. KP’s numbers are more realistic, so in a few years they may get ahead because they actually figured out how to solve problems.”
Reforming Pakistan’s Education
The Pakistani government has accelerating the universalization of primary education, increased enrollments, encouraged private sector involvement in education, improved technical and vocational education and placed greater emphasis on scientific and technical education in secondary and higher secondary. Among the obstacles are rapid population growth and poorly-trained teachers. [Source: “Cities of the World”, The Gale Group Inc., 2002]
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center: “The first step in the reform process has been striking ghost teachers from the payrolls and making sure teachers are in school. The other major effort has been making sure that school buildings are functional and safe for children, and may have other features like computer labs and playgrounds. But fixing infrastructure and getting teachers to show up are the low-hanging fruit of “Pakistan’s Education Crisis”.85 With reforms ongoing in Punjab since 2003, the province has learned that they cannot assume that children will learn once teachers, students, and schools buildings are in place. [Source: “Pakistan’s Education Crisis”, Woodrow Wilson Center, July 2016 ==]
“Salar Khattak, a member of a teachers’ union in KP, points out that teachers do not have the motivation, capabilities, or tools to teach: “You can use a stick and threaten a teacher to show up. He’ll go on time and show up. But how do you get the teacher to deliver to the student? In Pakistan, when you can’t become anything, you become a teacher. And if you can’t become a teacher, you become a maulana (priest).”
“Many donors and experts working on reforms today have come to believe that the poor quality of learning is linked to low enrollments and dropouts. Improving quality of learning is now a key indicator of the success of reforms, next to enrollments. It is also the toughest challenge to solve, despite comprehensive and even some creative efforts in the provinces. ==
“All four provinces are implementing or wanting to implement a similar model of reforms, building on Punjab’s example, detailed below. The reforms are managed by some version of a “service delivery unit,” an office staffed by experts, monitors, and data analysts that sits between a chief executive and his/ her education bureaucracy and monitors the achievement of reform targets.87 As the province makes progress, the World Bank and/or DFID, depending on the province, disburse budget support against line items that are, theoretically, exhausted by the reform agenda. But the results of this process vary, not just due to variation in political will, but also differences in provincial leadership and management styles. ==
Punjab Education Reforms
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center: “Punjab was an early mover in education reforms. The province’s “Schools Reform Roadmap” attracted international attention in 2013. However, Punjab’s education reforms actually started in 2003 under former President General Pervez Musharraf, with support from the World Bank. The high frequency of ghost schools and ghost teachers was uncovered around that time. Musharraf once said that “there are between 30,000 and 40,000 ghost schools, amounting to 20 percent of all schools.” [Source: “Pakistan’s Education Crisis”, Woodrow Wilson Center, July 2016 ==]
“In 2010, power over education devolved from the federal government to the provinces. At the same time, Department for International Development (DFID, Britain’s main aid organization) entered Punjab after it re-organized its global programming to focus on countries that were the most poor.
By 2011, when DFID initiated their program, the teacher absenteeism rate was 20 percent. Within one year, the teacher absenteeism rate was reduced to 9 percent.90 Today it is approaching 6 percent. The education program in Punjab became DFID’s largest program in the world. Pakistan is also now the largest recipient of DFID funding in the world. Today, the United Kingdom has displaced the United States as Pakistan’s largest bilateral donor. ==
Efforts to Reform Sindh’s Awful Education System
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center: “Sindh is counting on technology to solve tough political problems. Pechuho is described by staffers as “old but techie” and wanting “to create an education system he can control from his iPad.” Technical staff with experience in education referred to his vision as simplistic, although the technology has some automatic benefits. [Source: “Pakistan’s Education Crisis”, Woodrow Wilson Center, July 2016 ==]
“Sindh is at a nascent stage and struggling to hold teachers accountable. Over the past year, they have been working to establish a clean, digital record of teachers because the provincial payroll included thousands of people who were not employed by the ministry, had illegal promotions (through clerical actions), or were ghosts living far away and with other full-time jobs, such as actors and lawyers. The aim is to get the provincial payroll to match the ministry’s employment records and disburse salaries electronically. In the past, one employment letter could be copied and used to hire ten people. Now, the letters have a bar code so they cannot be duplicated. ==
“Sindh demonstrates how reforms can save provinces millions of dollars a month, rivaling the value of foreign aid when the value of efficiencies are aggregated. In the process of digitization, the province has so far stopped the salaries of three thousand teachers who did not show up to verify their employment over the course of months. Failure to show up and verify suggests these were false records or ghost teachers. At salaries that range from about US$150 to US$1,000 per month, this is significant saving for Sindh. If digitization is completed, and accountability measures are put in place to address closed schools and ghost employees, Sindh’s savings in one year could equal what USAID has set aside for the Sindh education department over five years. ==
“Teachers violently oppose switching from paper to digital records. In May 2015 teachers were asked to come to data centers across Sindh with their files and to record their fingerprints. In Larkana, they responded by destroying all the computers and servers in the data center. The exercise was re-started, but with the servers in Karachi. A protest over teachers’ salaries in Karachi in May 2016 ended with water-cannons, teargas, and a police baton-charge. Some “teachers” who wanted to protect their pocket money from the government flew from Dubai or the UK to record their fingerprints. In Sindh, it is common practice for teachers to sub-contract a relative to show up in their place or to pay off administrators to maintain their attendance records. ==
“The next step is to make sure that teachers show up to school. Sindh is doing this through spot checks by youth monitors. The monitors will record teachers’ fingerprints through devices attached to Android phones. The attendance system is based on biometric verification. Two hundred and twenty-five monitors have been hired for fifteen districts and a recruitment process is ongoing for one hundred and seventy more monitors for the remaining districts. Each monitor will be given a motorcycle, android device, and biometric device to monitor schools. ==
“Technology is seen as a way to short-circuit the collusion and corruption that is hard-wired into schooling system, but the true test is if teachers and administrators face consequences. Sindh so far is stopping salaries, but not firing missing teachers. Attempts to fire teachers are often reversed by the Chief Minister who can come under pressure from MPAs. ==
“They also get held up in litigation, with courts ruling in favor of protecting jobs. According to Umbreen Arif, the World Bank official in charge of Sindh and Balochistan: “Teachers are rarely dismissed from service, mostly due to political pressures or protection from the courts. The courts challenge dismissals and block proceedings through stay orders. ==
Are Pakistani Schools Set to Provide Jobs, Rather than Education?
Shahrukh Wani wrote in The Guardian: Education spending on the ground is being translated into schools as a means to provide jobs, rather than to provide children with a quality education. One of the leading research papers in this field is “Pakistan’s Education Crisis: The Real Story” by Wilson Center fellow Nadia Naviwala and Ahmad Ali from the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences in Islamabad. [Source: Shahrukh Wani, The Guardian, June 27, 2017 Shahrukh Wani is an Islamabad-based policy blogger.]
“There is a very strong political element to education spending, as legislators are customarily elected on the basis of how many jobs they can provide to their constituents, and hence hiring new teachers takes priority in budget allocation, particularly when close to a general election. For the government, this preoccupation appears to kill two birds with one stone; an easy fix for the education crises, and sought after permanent government jobs for their constituents. As a consequence, education departments are typically the single largest employers in most provinces.
“Increasing the number of teachers across the country has also been an easy policy for everyone to get behind, especially since the public discourse on fixing the education crisis has largely been focused on the need to spend more on education. In 2016, Pakistani provinces spent between 17 to 28 percent of their budgets on education, while the global average was 14 percent. Combined that’s US$7.5bn spent on public education nationally, with most provinces doubling their budgets within the past five years.
“But as Naviwala has argued, Pakistan can’t simply spend its way out of its education crisis. On the ground, most of the spending is being used for hiring non-performing teachers or providing salary hikes for existing teachers. A small section of the spending is set aside for new education infrastructure however about half of it, on average, goes unspent by provinces every year. In fact, the proportion of spending on much-needed education infrastructure has decreased, as salaries take a larger than ever proportion of the spending total. The problem is that this rapid rise in spending isn’t translating into education for all. School enrollment nationally has continued to stagnate.”
“Ultimately, Pakistan needs to combine any spending increases with critical reforms that develop accountability between teachers and parents. It needs to look into the curriculum it is teaching in classrooms, and develop an intensive monitoring system that makes sure that teachers are showing up for work and delivering quality education. For too long, our leaders have been focusing on expanding the size of the country’s education budget and falsely marketing it as showing the government’s growing commitment to quality education.
Problems with Reform Efforts in Pakistan Education
Aid money hasn’t helped. Griff Witte wrote in the Washington Post: ““Javed Ashraf Qazi, a former Pakistani education minister, said the United States has not helped by frittering away much of its assistance budget on poorly defined programs, such as conflict-resolution training, which he said leave no enduring impact. What Pakistan really needs, he said, is a network of vocational training institutes that can prepare students for the workplace. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a noted nuclear physicist at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University and a longtime proponent of education reform, said Pakistan needs something more fundamental. “I don't think it's a matter of money. The more you throw at the system, the faster it leaks out," he said. "There has to be a desire to improve. When Pakistanis feel they need a different kind of education system, that's when it will improve." [Source: Griff Witte, Washington Post, January 17, 2010]
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center: The problem in Pakistan is not a lack of demand for quality education. The problem is a lack of supply. Citizens can make marginal differences in an education system where politicians hold bureaucrats responsible for delivering services, such as in Punjab and KP (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). But it is unrealistic to expect citizen demand to make up for a lack of elite interest in a political system that has ignored public needs for decades. [Source: “Pakistan’s Education Crisis”, Woodrow Wilson Center, July 2016 ==]
The scale of Pakistan’s education crisis is enormous. Additionally, the chief tool to address it — the provincial education bureaucracy — is unwieldy and has evolved to respond to perverse incentives over the course of decades. Reforms are in progress, but they also need time and patience. Achieving quality education will be a slow and incremental process over generations, as one generation is educated and becomes a better teaching workforce for the next. Today, provinces are having trouble recruiting quality teachers, despite their qualifications on paper, because even government teacher training institutions have deteriorated. ==
“The most serious critique of” some reform efforts “is that the pressure for results from Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif is so intense that it is backfiring. “Shahbaz Sharif is operating almost solely on a deliverology model, which is ‘I will humiliate, yell, beat, ridicule, or fire you if you don’t perform. The system reacts like headless chickens, doing whatever it takes to placate him. But Sharif doesn’t understand the nuances, and no one can stand up to him.”97
“The problem with excessive pressure on an enormous education bureaucracy that is not built to cope with it is that it translates into a perverse pressure to fudge numbers. These fudged numbers show up most clearly in the government’s monthly monitoring of student learning outcomes. The monitors who visit schools every month recently started administering an iPad-based, four question test to third-graders on Urdu, English, and math ability. Punjab’s 36 districts are color-coded based on their average score. Officials in charge of the highest- and lowest-performing districts must answer directly to Shahbaz Sharif at “stocktakes” that take place every two to three months.
Recommendations to Improve Education in Pakistan
According to the Woodrow Wilson Center: Every province should have a strong and credible education minister who does not have a reputation for corruption or crime. With Sindh’s PPP [public-private partnership] leadership, international actors should stress the need for teacher accountability. The top of the political party must support the education bureaucracy in holding teachers responsible for showing up to school and teaching. Ghost teachers must continue to be cleared out of the system, an effective monitoring system should be put in place, and the teacher absentee rate must be reduced. External pressure may empower internal reformers in Sindh. [Source: “Pakistan’s Education Crisis”, Woodrow Wilson Center, July 2016 ==]
“Reduce the emphasis on funding levels. The hype around programs that are monetarily large increases expectations, while making effective programming less likely...There is a need for more study on how Pakistan’s provincial governments are performing relative to one another, and lessons learned for why some are more successful than others. This can help the governments learn from each other and fine-tune the management of reforms. Help raise public awareness about the content and progress of reforms and how the education budget is used, rather than advocacy aimed at simply doubling the budget. ==
“Political party chiefs must put their strongest people in charge of education, as well as health and other social sectors, and remove officials that are known to be corrupt and ineffective. In Sindh and Balochistan, political party chiefs must be clear to education ministers and secretaries that they have full political backing to implement reforms, including a zero-tolerance policy for misallocation or inefficient allocation of resources (read corruption). Sindh needs more meaningful support from party leaders for the reform agenda.” ==
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s “reforms have taken on the frustrating task of working through the bureaucracy, although with high level political backing from Imran Khan, the head of the party. The reforms are led by an understated education minister who is close to Khan and the education secretary. By contrast, in Punjab, the chief minister who is also the head of the party leads reforms himself. The net effect of Sharif’s top down pressure and a service delivery unit, staffed by young, energetic, highly qualified and highly capable staff, has been the disempowering of the education bureaucracy. ==
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Lonely Planet Guides, Library of Congress, Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (tourism.gov.pk), Official Gateway to the Government of Pakistan (pakistan.gov.pk), The Guardian, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Wikipedia and various books, websites and other publications.
Last updated February 2022