PAKISTAN declared an education emergency on 8 May 2024, the Prime Minister undertaking to supervise it personally and to bring some 26 million out-of-school children into classrooms. That December the federation issued a National Education Policy Development Framework; in January this year, the thirty-eighth Inter-Provincial Education Ministers Conference unanimously endorsed a National Education Emergency Action Plan. In barely two years, then, a declaration, a framework and a plan — for a system Pakistan no longer nationally administers. Since the Eighteenth Amendment, the federation may announce priorities, convene ministers and publish targets, yet teachers, schools and budgets through which those targets must be met remain provincial. The question is not whether these ambitions are desirable. It is whether anyone can be held responsible for delivering them.
The constitutional arithmetic is unambiguous. The Eighteenth Amendment of 2010 abolished the Concurrent Legislative List and its forty-seven subjects, transferring education to federating units. In the same amendment, Article 25-A made free and compulsory education for children aged five to sixteen a fundamental right binding upon the State — but the State that recruits teachers, prints textbooks and pays salaries is now, overwhelmingly, provincial one.
What the federation retained is narrow and largely coordinative standards in higher education and research institutions, the federally administered territories, and forums such as the Council of Common Interests and ministerial conference itself. The 2024 framework acknowledged this candidly, providing that the federal, provincial and area education departments would each develop their own policy in line with it. Pakistan is thus producing a family of policies coordinated by a conference, not a single system governed by a plan.
Within that shrinking envelope the disparities are severe, and they do not run in the expected direction. Balochistan’s per capita education allocation for 2026-27, roughly Rs9,668, is well above Punjab’s Rs5,873 — yet close to two-thirds of Balochistan’s school-age children are out of school, against 44 per cent in Sindh, 34 per cent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 27 per cent in Punjab and 15 per cent in Islamabad. Punjab records the strongest primary gross enrolment ratio at 88 per cent while spending the least per secondary student of any unit, some Rs27,599 in 2023-24. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa allocated the largest budget share to education of any province in 2022-23, at 25 per cent, and utilised the least of it, 82 per cent against Punjab’s 99.
Nationally, some 11 per cent of combined education allocations went unspent in 2021-22. Money, budget share and results move independently of one another — precisely what an operating system exists to prevent. Beneath the disparity sits a more basic failure: national targets cannot be monitored on incomparable numbers. Within a single week last March the Pakistan Institute of Education circulated an out-of-school figure of 26.2 million and then, in its own financing report, 25.37 million. The 2023 Census and UNICEF yield further variants, and Balochistan’s exclusion rate is put anywhere between 58 and 69 per cent depending on the instrument.
Most strikingly, provisional findings from the Annual Status of Education Report for 2025 put over 90 per cent of children aged six to sixteen in school, implying an out-of-school share below ten per cent — a fraction of the government’s estimate. The age bands, sampling frames and definitions differ, which is the point: Pakistan has no agreed method for counting the children its policies are written about. The same fog covers learning. The World Bank’s learning-poverty estimate, carried in the government’s own 2025-26 financing report, holds that 77 per cent of ten-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple text; ASER’s provisional 2025 findings put only about 7 per cent of Class 3 children able to read a Class 2-level story in Urdu or Sindhi, rising to roughly half by Class 5. Where the denominator is contested, every claim of progress becomes unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable progress is indistinguishable from none.
What is missing is therefore not authority but instrumentation — a National Education Compact, negotiated through the Council of Common Interests rather than announced from Islamabad, resting on five commitments. First, common learning benchmarks: a jointly agreed floor for foundational literacy and numeracy at grades three and five, identically assessed. Second, an annual provincial performance report, tabled in each provincial assembly and in Parliament, reporting against those benchmarks. Third, interoperable data — one agreed definition of an out-of-school child, unique student identifiers, and provincial systems that reconcile to a single national ledger. Fourth, conditional federal financing. The instruments exist in embryo, in the federal Challenge Fund for out-of-school children and the performance-based grants under ASPIRE; they should be scaled and made contingent on verified enrolment and learning gains. Education should also carry weight in the next National Finance Commission award — a distribution still governed by the 2009 formula. Fifth, published responsibility: named officers, dated deliverables, and a public register of what was promised against what was achieved.
January’s ministerial conference showed that consensus is attainable. Every unit endorsed the emergency plan and reported real work, from 1.8 million ghost students struck off Punjab’s rolls to 3,200 schools reopened in Balochistan. Yet the approved projects were referred upward for ratification by a task force, and the aim of returning some 20 million children to classrooms in a single year sits oddly beside an emergency already in its third. Consensus is not a contract. A policy that names an obligation but no obligor produces communiqués, not classrooms. Pakistan has enough policies. It needs one enforceable agreement.
—The writer is Commoner from 44th Common Educationist — Founder of WHI Institute.based in Sargodha.
