IN less than three years, Punjab has transferred the management of roughly thirteen thousand government schools to private operators, non-governmental organizations and individual licensees. It is among the largest recorded reassignments of public educational management in Pakistan’s history and it has advanced with little sustained public argument. On figures reported this year, schools under direct government management are contracting towards thirty-seven thousand, with further tranches of small institutions under consideration for merger or closure. Its scale alone deserves more scrutiny than it has received.
The case for it is not frivolous. Punjab inherited thousands of severely under-enrolled and single-teacher schools with a per-student cost that no finance department could easily defend. Combined federal and provincial education spending has remained below two per cent of GDP for years, against the four to six per cent benchmark commonly recommended internationally. When money is that thin, the argument that a licensee can run the same building at lower cost, with staff answerable to enrolment rather than to a distant transfer order, has force. Nor is partnership an alien import: the Punjab Education Foundation has run versions of it for two decades and the Punjab Education Initiatives Management Authority received statutory footing in 2018.
The difficulty is not that the state has contracted delivery. It is that contracting is being asked to do the work of state capacity rather than to supplement it. The transfer moves management of a building and a roll of students. It does not move the deficits that produced the empty classroom: the recruitment gaps teachers’ representatives have complained of for years, the tens of thousands of sanctioned posts they say remain unfilled, the census data that drove no decision until closures became administratively convenient and the household economics keeping close to ten million Punjabi children out of school altogether. A licensee on a limited per-child subsidy, hiring instructors on insecure contracts, is positioned to solve none of these. Expecting otherwise is a category error.
The evidence question is where the programme is most exposed. The government’s own account is encouraging: the National Commission for Human Development was commissioned to evaluate the first phase and enrolment across the 5,863 schools transferred in October 2024 is reported to have risen from roughly 228,000 to 441,000 in seven months. That gain should not be waved away. But enrolment is the one outcome a contracting model is best designed to move — licensees are paid per child — and it says nothing about whether those children are learning. The limits of the metric showed this July, when officials moved to close or merge several hundred schools on the stated ground that enrolment had not improved even after they were outsourced. Beyond headcount, the record thins considerably. The programme has reached thirteen thousand institutions before its results at five thousand eight hundred were independently established on learning rather than attendance. Scaling ahead of evaluation is a familiar habit — one a Civil Services Academy review this July called a central failure: not a shortage of plans, but an inability to implement and evaluate them.
The equity dimension deserves naming plainly. The schools selected are, by design, the small ones — initially those under a hundred pupils, with higher thresholds reportedly considered later. Many serve rural communities, so closures and mergers may fall heaviest on girls, for whom distance is the binding constraint on attendance. A child in Lahore whose school is outsourced may have alternatives within walking distance. A girl in a chak where the primary school is the only school is not choosing between providers; she is choosing between this school and no school. Merge her school into one several kilometres away and expenditure is rationalized, but her education may effectively end.
This is not an argument for the status quo ante, which was indefensible. It is an argument for three things the state cannot contract out. The first is measurement. Punjab should publish, annually and through a body independent of the school education department, comparable learning data for outsourced, merged and directly managed schools. Not enrolment — learning. PEIMA’s own physical-verification drives, run to identify unverifiable students, show how far a headcount can drift from the classroom. Without a common assessment applied to both arms, the province is spending public money with no reliable way of knowing whether it is buying anything.
The second is contract capacity. A partnership model is only as good as the authority that writes, monitors and terminates the contracts. That requires officers trained in procurement and performance management, penalties that are actually imposed and a grievance mechanism parents can reach. A regulator unwilling or unable to revoke a licence is not an effective regulator. It also requires publishing the contracts, so citizens learn what was promised on their behalf and at what price, from the record rather than from a protest. The third is a guaranteed floor. No settlement should be left without a functioning school within a defensible distance, whoever operates it. Where the market will not serve, the state must — and must staff it, which means resuming recruitment rather than letting rationalization thin the cadre by attrition.
Article 25-A of the Constitution is not drafted in the conditional. The state’s obligation to provide free and compulsory education to every child between five and sixteen does not diminish when a licensee holds the keys. Punjab may lawfully contract the delivery of schooling; it cannot contract away the duty. The safeguards above are what that duty looks like in a contracted system and the moment to build them in is now.
—The writer is Commoner from 44th Common Educationist — Founder of WHI Institute.based in Sargodha.
