SUMMER vacations were once declared to shield children from extreme heat. Schools still keep that calendar, yet the notification closing them makes no provision for what the monsoon now does in the same weeks. In flood-prone districts, children returning find the season written across their schools: collapsed boundary walls, flooded classrooms, infrastructure that did not survive their absence. By 26 July the National Disaster Management Authority had counted 107 deaths since the monsoon began a month earlier. Of the 97 dead in the tally issued a day before, 43 were children. Those deaths are counted. The schooling lost in the same districts is not.
Five days earlier, the Pakistan Institute of Education and the Japan International Cooperation Agency launched the Annual Statistical Report 2024-25 and the Federal Non-Formal Education Strategy 2025. A national education emergency stands declared and the Federal Secretary for Education named the first priority: 25.3 million out-of-school children. That ambition requires a policy shift, not administrative effort. Climate change removes children from school by two routes. The first is displacement, as families abandon a flood-prone district for safer ground. The second is destitution, as the water takes the crop, livestock or wage. A damaged building can be rebuilt within a season. A family pushed below subsistence cannot and the child who leaves for that reason seldom returns.
Physical damage makes both routes recur. The 2025 season, the deadliest since 2022, damaged 667 schools in Punjab alone, more than half of them girls’ schools, on the provincial education department’s own count. Older wreckage has not cleared: of the 19,808 Sindh schools damaged in 2022, 14,343 were still awaiting restoration this March, with Khairpur the worst-affected district. The forecast was clear. Before the season opened, the NDMA projected rainfall 22 to 26 per cent above 2025, the year floods killed more than a thousand people. July has run lighter than that projection implies; the heavier weeks are ahead. UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Report, published last month, finds children in Pakistan exposed to more overlapping hazards, at greater intensity than almost anywhere in the world.
The damage to enrolment is slower and less visible. In Sindh, 7.4 million children, 44 per cent of the five-to-sixteen age group, are out of school and the steepest attrition arrives at the end of primary. In Mirpurkhas, where the same fields went under in 2011 and 2022, the exit is gradual. When the road floods and the family’s income goes with the crop, a girl’s name stays on the register while her schooling quietly ends. Registers count admissions. They cannot see the child who attended for a fortnight in October and never returned. The strategy’s own figures show the fragility. Its 30,543 non-formal centres serve 1.24 million learners, under five per cent of the population they exist to reach and ninety-seven per cent stop at primary level.
Three corrections would alter the arithmetic. The first is a construction standard that binds rather than aspires. The instruments exist: the Pakistan School Safety Framework, developed by the NDMA with UNICEF and the Pakistan Building Code, which many pre-2007 buildings fail to meet. Compliance pays visibly. The 106 climate-resilient schools built in Sindh with American assistance survived the 2022 floods intact; a Japanese-funded programme has retrofitted 150 schools across eight Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa districts, Buner among them. On 12 August last year the NDMA handed the Framework to federal and provincial education departments, with a technical working group and audit checklist. Three days later the cloudbursts began; Buner buried more than two hundred.
Since the Eighteenth Amendment placed school education with the provinces, Islamabad cannot impose that standard by fiat. It does not need to. Federal transfers and donor-funded reconstruction remain the largest source of school construction money in flood-prone districts and both can be conditioned. Hazard certification for every site, with funds released only against it, is a financing rule, not a legislative one. The second is an academic calendar designed for disruption rather than wishing it away. Calendars already flex for heat; they should flex for flood, transparently and in advance — protecting instructional days ahead of the monsoon, holding accelerated learning modules ready so recovery begins the week the water recedes and scheduling examinations outside the windows in which rivers rise.
The third is a two-page continuity plan for every school: who is responsible, where registers are stored, which building serves as alternative teaching space, how each absent child is traced by name. Schools must also stop absorbing the second closure relief duty imposes. Other public buildings should be designated as shelters before the water arrives. Education expenditure stands at 0.8 per cent of GDP, a record low against a UNESCO benchmark of four to six per cent; the share reaching flood-damaged schools is smaller still.
Money is not the only problem. The digital system now monitoring non-formal learners must record attendance and progression, not admissions alone, which costs almost nothing. The state has declared an education emergency and lives through a climate emergency every July, yet administers the two as separate files in separate ministries. They are one emergency. One emergency, two fronts. The water will not be argued with; the vacuum where policy should sit can be filled — by fiscal year, by notification, by a certified site plan. Lose the second front and the ruins will do the teaching, as they have taught nothing yet. Twenty-five million children cannot be enrolled into buildings the next monsoon takes down.
—The writer is Commoner from 44th Common Educationist — Founder of WHI Institute.based in Sargodha.
