ACKNOWLEDGING that lack of financial resources was the biggest obstacle in the way of galvanizing mental faculties of talented children, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has expressed the confidence that the establishment of Daanish School will help provide equal opportunities for quality education to poor and deserving children. Speaking at the inaugural ceremony of a Daanish School in the Federal Capital, he emphasized that Pakistan cannot reach its true destination without ensuring accessible, high-quality opportunities for all citizens across every field, stressing that every child from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to Gilgit-Baltistan must be equipped with a quality education.
The remarks of the Prime Minister are understandable as Pakistan has 25.1 to 26.2 million out-of-school children aged 5 to 16, which represents roughly 35% to 38% of the school-age population. This gives the country one of the highest numbers of out-of-school children in the world. Incidentally, as the PM was lamenting lack of access to quality education, Gilgit-Baltistan Chief Minister Amjad Hussain disclosed that there were 55,000 out-of-school children in Diamir district of GB alone, making a welcome announcement of a plan to integrate home-based schools into the public system to ensure equal access for children in remote valleys. Poverty and economic hardships constitute one of the main factors behind this large number of out-of-school children as low household income makes schooling unaffordable because families cannot pay for books, uniforms or transport even if there are public sector educational institutions nearby. Poverty also pushes many children into the work force or agriculture labour to supplement family income. Reports also indicate girls face disproportionate barriers, including restrictive social norms, safety concerns, early/forced marriages and a lack of separate or functional toilet facilities in schools. Many families do not think it appropriate to send their daughters to educational institutions if these are not located within a safe distance. In addition, a large number of public schools lack basic facilities such as boundary walls, electricity, clean drinking water and functional toilets. Above all, slogan-mongering by successive governments notwithstanding, the fact remains national budget allocations for education remain abysmally low at 0.8% of the GDP, with the vast majority of funds consumed by recurrent costs and staff salaries rather than expansion or quality improvement. In this backdrop, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif deserves credit for his continued focus on promotion of education and ensuring greater access to quality education in his capacity as Chief Minister of Punjab and now as the chief executive of the country. He is rightly credited for the introduction of a highly transparent and merit-based recruitment policy for teachers in Punjab, which has contributed a lot in improving the standard of education in the public sector schools in the province. He has launched a series of aggressive reforms centered on the declaration of a National Education Emergency. A cornerstone of the Prime Minister’s vision is the federal expansion of the Punjab Daanish Schools—highly modern, free boarding facilities explicitly built for underprivileged and marginalized youth. Its sprawling Islamabad campus offers state-of-the-art separate boys and girls boarding, advanced robotics labs, smart interactive boards and 100% merit-based free enrollment for marginalized children. In addition, the Government has introduced structured roadmaps to systematically reverse the reality where four out of five children fail to read basic text by age 10. A National Institute of Excellence in Teacher Education has been established in the capital to serve as a center of teacher training, pedagogical research and digital mastery to retrain public sector educators. These and similar other initiatives at the federal level are laudable but education being a provincial subject, the situation will not improve meaningfully if provinces do not increase education budget and invest significantly in expanding the network of quality public sector educational institutions. The positive impact of declaring a National Education Emergency is not so far clearly visible and this requires direct intervention by the Prime Minister.
