THIS summer, Punjab established 6,060 learning camps across 3,030 selected schools in twelve districts. The eight-week initiative, notified under the Taleem Programme, targeted foundational literacy and numeracy among children aged roughly five to nine, alongside an out-of-school-children objective. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ran its own camps through June for grades three to eight, with remedial learning named in the notification. Neither province can be accused of ignoring the vocabulary of remediation. The difficulty lies one level below the notification. Additional classes are not necessarily remedial classes. If the same curriculum reaches the same children by the same method, only in summer, the system has extended instruction rather than corrected learning. Remediation begins not with another lesson but with a diagnosis, and with the willingness to act on what it reveals.
Consider a Grade 3 room in one of these camps, put to the test ASER has used in Pakistani households for a decade. One child reads a short Urdu story and retells it. A second manages single words but cannot hold a sentence together. A third does not reliably distinguish letters, and cannot complete a two-digit subtraction. Their admission records place all three at the same level; their competencies do not. Where camps reach Grade 8, the spread is wider still, the deficits accumulated across six years of promotion.
The scale of that accumulation is not in dispute. The World Bank’s Learning Poverty Brief of September 2024 estimates that 80 per cent of Pakistani children at late-primary age are not proficient in reading once out-of-school children are included. It rests largely on pre-pandemic evidence, so the closures of 2020 and floods of 2022 are not yet reflected. The conventional response is to accelerate coverage: finish missed chapters, add homework, hold extra classes. This helps children already close to the standard; for those years behind it compounds the injury. A child who has not mastered subtraction is not repaired by receiving fractions faster. Each new concept becomes another storey added to a structure nobody surveyed for load.
The alternative sequence is well established. Children first take a short oral and written assessment of foundational reading and arithmetic, carrying no marks, showing only what each can do unaided. They are then grouped by demonstrated level rather than administrative grade, and reassessed at intervals so groups are corrected as children move. The Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, convened by the World Bank with FCDO, UNICEF and USAID, named it one of only three “great buys” in global education in 2023.
Pakistan need not import it. Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi has run the model here for a decade as Chalo Parho Barho, and at scale in the Sindh flood response, where some 30,000 children passed through camps of up to sixty days in Shikarpur and Ghotki. The operational detail matters: children were grouped by ability rather than age or grade, and reassessed at fifteen-day intervals, so grouping was corrected twice during the camp rather than fixed at the outset.
Nor is it accurate to say Punjab lacks diagnostic instruments. The Programme Monitoring and Implementation Unit states that baseline and endline assessments are to be conducted in each camp, and the World Bank’s 2025 programme document describes a remedial assessment package covering oral and written reading in English and Urdu and basic numeracy. The instruments exist on paper. The unanswered question is what happens to them. No publicly available framework shows those results forming teaching groups inside a camp, and official reporting still counts camps and children registered rather than verified learning gains.
Teachers in the Punjab camps are reported to receive an additional Rs40,000 a month above salary. On the department’s own figures, 6,060 camps for eight weeks, one teacher to each camp puts the honorarium alone near half a billion rupees, before materials, monitoring or transport. That is defensible if the camps taught children what they could not do, and not as an attendance subsidy. A department that can account to the rupee for what it spent should report what the spending bought.
Two objections deserve an answer. The first is that ability grouping entrenches tracking. The safeguard is duration and mobility: grouping lasts weeks, is reconstituted at each reassessment, and covers foundational skills rather than a child’s overall standing. Where it has hardened into tracking, it did so because reassessment was abandoned. The second objection is that teachers cannot deliver differentiated instruction on present capacity. This is the serious one, and no notification answers it. It requires concise assessment tools, structured materials, small groups, practical training, and district officers who ask for learning gain, not photographs and registers. Selection deserves the same scrutiny: camps attract the children easiest to reach, not those carrying the largest deficit, and enrolment should follow assessed need.
Eight weeks can begin a recovery but cannot complete one. Children still behind need small-group support during the regular year, and their competencies should travel with them in a record rather than a grade on an admission form. None of this requires a new authority or another declaration, only a change in administrative behaviour: assess, group, teach, reassess, adapt, publish. Provinces could begin where camps already operate, release results district by district, and expand only what shows measurable gain. Pakistan’s system has long mistaken progression for learning. Whether these camps break that pattern will not be determined by how many hours children sat in classrooms, but by whether the system found out what they had not learned, taught precisely that, and was willing to publish the difference.
—The writer is Commoner from 44th Common Educationist — Founder of WHI Institute.based in Sargodha.
