POLICY ANALYSIS
Review Report of Education Policies of Pakistan from 2011 to 2020
Review Report of Education Policies of Pakistan from 2011 to 2020
National Education Policy Framework launched under the government's 100-day plan
calls for a number of changes to Pakistan’s educational system, such as a tech-
based Smart Schools System, an Educational Volunteer Programme and an increase in
the number of non-formal schools. While the proposed reforms would be a major
change to the current education landscape, they are in a long and active history of
education reforms.
Pakistan invests effort in fixing education
Over the past two decades, Pakistan has been remarkably prolific in passing
education reforms. In every key area of policy, from teachers to accountability to
basic inputs, the government has pushed through a major reform almost every five
years.This pace is especially remarkable when compared to peer countries, where
reforms are often subject to years of debate or blocked by powerful opposition
groups like teachers’ unions or political opponents. Indeed, Pakistan has gained
international attention as “perhaps the world’s largest laboratory for education
reform.”
Pakistan invests money in fixing education
Vigorous activity in the policy arena has also been accompanied by a striking rise
in education spending. National spending on education rose 160 percent from 2011–
2017, which fueled improvements in key educational resources like school
infrastructure and teacher salaries.
Pakistan government education spending (2010-2016)
Given the magnitude of changes to both policy and funding, improvements to
educational outcomes seemed inevitable, but surprisingly, growth in enrollment and
test scores — the two best measures of education success has been
disappointing.There has been some improvement: today, most Pakistani children
attend school at some point in their lives and more are persisting on to secondary
school and university. Nonetheless, around 30 percent of students do not reach
sixth grade, and enrollment lags behind relatively poorer countries in Africa and
Asia that have achieved near universal primary enrollment.
Net Enrolment at primary level for 6 to 10-year-olds
Learning growth is even more disheartening. Measures from the independent
assessment organisation ASER show that test scores have fluctuated over the past
five years and show only modest growth in the most recent round in 2018 certainly
not commensurate with the improvements in policy and influx of funding.
Unintended Consequences
Reforms can hurt just as much or more than they help. For example, the Punjab
Examination Commission (PEC) exam, introduced in 2005, was intended to provide
critical data on learning and equity.
However, because the exam was conducted in February, it appeared to compress the
part of the school year when students are likely to learn the most: anecdotal
evidence suggests that the months of concentrated learning were reduced to August
through December.
Most teachers devoted January to test prep, and then had lower incentives to
improve their students’ learning levels in the months following the exam, since any
gains would be credited to the teacher of the next grade up.
Although we do not have the data to understand whether learning would have been
greater in the absence of PEC, what is clear is that the shortening of the school
year was an unintended consequence, whose ramifications are ill-understood.
Contradictory Effects
When so many reforms are developed independently, they are prone to contradict each
other. For example, provinces have made various efforts over the years to empower
schools and parents to make decisions, such as by establishing School Councils that
give parents and communities a role in deciding how some education funds should be
spent. At the same time, the government has vastly increased school monitoring and
aimed to standardise school inputs, which reduces the decision-making authority of
individual schools.
These efforts at decentralisation (through School Councils, school grants, contract
teachers) and centralisation (through standardised curricula, monitoring, teacher
hiring) stand in direct contrast and often prevent reforms on either end of the
spectrum from generating a full impact.
Observing these examples, policymakers should pay greater attention to how each
change is likely to interact with the broader education system. In particular, they
should consider how standardisation might inhibit the ability of parents and
schools to innovate and hold each other accountable, as was the intention of
earlier decentralising reforms.
Piloting works
If you can imagine the unintended consequences of and contradictory interactions
between policies in the profusion of reforms, then you can see why enrollment and
learning gains might be slow even when certain reforms had positive effects.
The problem is, with so many hurried and overlapping changes, we don’t know which
reforms have been effective and which have led to further problems. But there is a
way to find out.
Before implementing reforms across the province or country, the government can try
them out with a smaller group of schools. Pilot testing allows schools and teachers
in the test group to provide critical feedback that can be used to improve the
final policy design.
Piloting also creates the space for researchers to conduct rigorous evaluations to
isolate the outcomes attributable to the specific policy in question, rather than a
range of other reforms that are often introduced at the same time.
National Plan of Action to Accelerate Education-Related MDGs 2013-16
Pakistan is amongst the nine countries, which have the largest numbers of primary-
age group out-of-school children. To initiate in-country dialogues for reviewing
the progress against Millennium Development Goals, The World Bank organized the
“Learning for All Ministerial Meeting” on April 18, 2013, in collaboration with the
Global Partnership for Education (GPE), UN Secretary-General, and the UN Special
Envoy for Global Education. The purpose of the meeting was to explore concrete
steps in order to accelerate progress towards ensuring that all children attend
school and learn. Pakistan could not participate in the meeting because general
elections were being held in Pakistan. However, the Ministry of Education,
Trainings & tandards in Higher Education (MET&SHE) undertook an important
initiative to prepare status report on education-related MDGs.
Following are the Salient Features of National Action Plan 2013-2016
The MDG Acceleration Framework (MAF)
1- MAF Plan Targets
2- Challenges to Education: Voices from the Provinces/Areas
3- Bottlenecks & Suggested Strategies
4- MAF Plan Strategies & Interventions
5- Physical Targets and Cost Estimates For MAF
6- Strategies to Accelerate New Enrolment and Enhance Quality in Pakistan
7- Implementation & Monitoring Mechanism
Provincial/Area MAF Plans of Action
1- Balochistan Plan of Action (MAF)
2- Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Plans of Action
3- Gilgit Baltistan Plan of Action
4- Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) Plan of Action
5- Khyber Pakhtunkhawa Plan of Action
6- Punjab Plan of Action
7- Sindh Plan of Action
8- Azad Jammu & Kashmir Plan of Action
Education Reform 2017
STEVE Jobs once said, “sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best
to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.” Innovation
is an adaptive or inventive learning process. By being adaptive, an organisation
can produce the same products cheaper to improve profits. By being inventive, an
organisation can keep producing better products to keep customers paying, which is
what Apple successfully did. Deciding between these two approaches, whether to
improve upon existing solutions or design new ones altogether, is a choice that
education policymakers are currently facing in Pakistan.
The test score data in the Annual Status of Education Report for all provinces from
2011 on shows little improvement in learning. Ten years from now, Pakistan may have
more high school graduates, but that may not mean much in terms of being
employable. If learning does not improve, policymakers could even argue that these
children are better off outside school learning a trade or being employed. The
injustice aside, this is a waste of precious material and human resources,
something that a developing country like Pakistan cannot afford.
Evidence should guide our choices in education
The first surprising fact was that there have been more than 100 reforms since 2000
alone. The second surprising fact is that all these reforms make sense; they are
consistent with what countries around the world do to improve their educational
outcomes. They include incentivising teachers, raising teacher qualification
levels, improving the curriculum, more testing, better textbooks and better
education support services. Name any reform, and it is almost guaranteed that it
has been tried.
Take the 2010 Punjab school merger and staff rationalisation policies. To counter
teacher shortage, the government of Punjab introduced teacher rationalisation
policies that allowed teachers to be transferred from low to high-enrolment
schools, where they were needed. The government had done this twice before in 2005
and 2008 with the aim of having one teacher for 40 students in a school. However,
the imbalance kept returning because teachers sought transfers to their previous
schools. The government took an adaptive approach in 2010 to improve upon the
current solution by merging low-enrolment schools with high-enrolment schools
before shifting surplus teachers to schools that needed them.
The policies led to unintended consequences including a loss of female teachers
because the merged schools tended to be further away, causing some women to leave
the profession, along with increased teacher absenteeism. In fact, this effort
worsened the shortage of teachers.
The Single National Curriculum (SNC) (2020)
Proposed by the government of Pakistan reveals that it has been constructed with a
view to achieving the state’s ideological imperatives, rather than pedagogical aims
and goals. The overriding theme is the construction of a majoritarian religious
nationalism, underlined by the national security narrative.
The 18th constitutional amendment devolved education to the provinces and declared
it to be a fundamental right (Article 25A). Fearful of the loss of control over
what is taught to our future citizens, many in parliament propagated the need for a
centralised curriculum in the interest of national integration. The proposed SNC is
aimed at centralising curriculum construction so that the national security
paradigm, based on a singular religious nationalism, is reproduced. This violates
the principles of federalism, democracy and provincial rights, reinforces
majoritarian politics at the cost of both minority sects within Islam and non-
Muslims. It also undermines the 18th Amendment.
Religious Nationalism
Pakistan’s educational policies of 1959 and 1979 emphasised a homogenised religious
nationalism to achieve ‘national integration’. A highly centralised state required
a centrist religious nationalism to erase the myriad differences of religion,
caste, class, ethnicity and sect. As such, education has been the means to
ideological and political ends, and not tailored to the child’s holistic
development that would meet the goal of universal education and equip
schoolchildren for informed, self-aware and responsible citizenship.
Religion — Inclusion and Exclusion
The SNC places an enormous emphasis on religious material and reduces the time and
energy spent on secular education, which is necessary for students’ effective
functioning as economically productive and socially aware citizens in modern times.
While religious content is necessarily the primary focus in Islamiat, it also forms
a substantial part of the social studies and language curricula and includes the
mandatory rote learning of the Quran, Hadith, surahs and ayats in both Arabic and
in Urdu translation. Rote memorisation discourages debate, critical enquiry,
understanding and analysis.
The overburdening of students and teachers with rote methods and heavy course
content leaves little room for cognitive growth through experience and activity-
based learning, including music, dance, theatre, play and other creative
activities. Further, though lip service is paid to diversity, mutual cooperation,
social cohesion and interfaith harmony, there is an overemphasis on one religion at
the expense of the beliefs of non-Muslim citizens and their right to impart their
own knowledge to future generations.
The Minister for Federal Education has stated that the Ministry has no plans to
compel private sector schools to employ madrassah-trained qaris for Nazira-i-Quran
and correct Arabic pronunciation. However, no such assurance has been given with
regard to public sector schools that are under direct government control and cater
to the bulk of Pakistan’s school-going children. If applied to public sector
schools, the presence of qaris in place of mainstream Islamiat teachers would seed
the system with madrassah teachers and introduce a monovisual, coercive and
‘jihadist’ culture to all public sector schools. At the same time, it would render
children vulnerable to abuse (both sexual and physical) as is the case in so many
madrassahs. This would also impinge on the children’s right to freedom from fear
and a safe learning environment. It would also have immense negative impact on non-
Muslim children and female students and staff.
Sectarianism – Perpetuating a Singular View of Religion
Not only is the religion of the overwhelming majority emphasised at the cost of
Pakistan’s essential plurality and diversity, a singular interpretation of Islam is
accepted. The state uses a Sunni/Hanafi version of religion over all the other
sects, interpretations and articulations of religion. There are several sects and
sub-sects of Islam, along with varying interpretations, such as those of
Deobandis/Wahabis and Barelvis.
While madrassahs teach their own sectarian versions, the Women’s Action Forum (WAF)
fails to understand the grounds on which the state feels it is qualified to define
and select one as the ‘true’ interpretation of Islam. When the state aligns itself
with one sect or a singular interpretation of religion, it opens the doors to
sectarian conflict, which can turn violent. It is inevitable that sectarian
conflicts will be reflected in the classroom and school campuses. The state must
remain neutral in matters of faith, as it represents all citizens irrespective of
their religion or belief, and not use the SNC to further religious nationalism,
homogenisation and centralism.
Gendered Curriculum – the Absence of Women
The curriculum is blind to the existence of women in society. In the Islamiat
curriculum, only two women, Hazrat Khadija (RA) and Hazrat Fatima (RA), are
mentioned, with an emphasis only on their role as submissive and subservient wife
and daughter. Though mention is made of Hazrat Khadija as the first convert to
Islam, there is no mention of her as a successful independent businesswoman prior
to her marriage. The large number of strong and independent Muslim women, beginning
with Hazrat Zainab (RA) and throughout later history, are completely overlooked.
In social studies, the vast contribution of women leaders, scientists, thinkers,
writers, sportswomen, pilots, singers, dancers, actors is absent. As in the past,
women’s representation is limited to their reproductive role (household, childcare)
or to the socially accepted professions that are an extension of the nurturing
category, such as doctors and teachers. It is not hard to predict the gender bias
in the content of the model textbooks planned by the Ministry of Federal Education
as part of the SNC.
Human Rights Education
The social studies (civics) component is completely silent on fundamental rights.
This is a serious omission that sabotages the SNC’s own stated aim of enabling
children to develop an understanding and respect for the beliefs and practices of
others as well as a sense of responsible citizenship ‘in community, country and the
world’. The civics curriculum should be mandatory for all students. This curriculum
must focus on the fundament rights enshrined in the Constitution as well as
international conventions and agreements to which Pakistan is committed. At the
same time, the civics curriculum must emphasise the plurality and diversity of
Pakistan and ensure that citizens recognise and respect differences of faith, sect,
ethnicity, language, class and gender.
Class and Curriculum
The rhetoric of the government around the SNC is that it will overcome the class
divide by creating ‘one, not two Pakistans.’ It is hard to understand how the
curriculum, or even the education system, will change the class structure of
Pakistan. In class-based societies, education follows and reproduces the class
structures that produce it. Different social classes follow differing educational
trajectories and end up reproducing pre-existing class structures.
The fact that the curriculum is blind to the class divide shows up in the economics
part of social studies, which is focused on the function of the State Bank of
Pakistan, its governor and the role of the stock market, but does not allude even
indirectly to issues pertaining to economic inequality. There is no proposal to
teach children about the unjust distribution of societal resources, poverty and its
causes and deprivation and hunger. It is supply and demand economics and the stock
market within a neoliberal paradigm where only the rich invest.
Methodological and Practical Problems
Apart from the main ideological problems of the SNC, there are a host of
methodological and practical issues that will make it difficult, if not impossible,
to realise it in practice. Keeping in mind that this section of the SNC has been
designed for preschoolers and Classes 1-5 (ages 4-10), it places a heavy burden and
conflicting demands on the children that will inhibit, rather than facilitate,
learning:
Apart from the enormous amount of rote learning, the SNC subjects children to two
oppositional systems: an enquiry-based approach for secular school subjects, and
the Dars-e-Nizami predicated on memorisation, preservation and respect for
Islamiat. Taken together and combined with a syllabus that is too heavy for
preschoolers and classes 1-5 (ages 4-10), attempts to fulfil the SNC’s objectives
will not only expose children to a process that will destroy their interest in
learning, it will also kill creativity and intellectual curiosity. The pressure
this arrangement will put on them would come within the purview of serious
psychological and emotional abuse, including vulnerability to physical and sexual
violence.
The Education Budget and Infrastructural Issues
Many of the infrastructural and teachers’ education problems are because of the low
priority accorded to education. Pakistan has historically spent less than two per
cent of its GDP on education. Most of the allocation is consumed by recurring
expenditures and there is little left over to improve quality. Despite being a
fundamental right, education has not been prioritised in Pakistan, as resources are
spent on unproductive sectors.
Discounting the need of the 22.8 million-plus out-of-school children that the SNC
does not mention, public sector schools face serious infrastructural and practical
problems. Many schools lack access to clean drinking water, toilets, boundary
walls, adequate lighting, fans and appropriately ventilated classrooms. A deterrent
for all students, a lack of toilets poses a serious problem particularly for girls,
especially at puberty, and constitutes a known cause of absenteeism or post-puberty
school dropout.
Further, while it is easy to blame socio-cultural reasons for the low enrolment of
girls, among the real causes are:
(i) Distance between students’ homes and middle and high schools
(ii) Safety and security issues
(iii) Lack of safe and affordable public transport.
Conclusion
Despite an adaptive approach, these policies did not achieve its desired
objectives. Perhaps the mistake is that we are not challenging the policy’s
fundamental underlying assumptions. In fact, the assumption that schools require
one teacher for 40 students has not even been tested, let alone challenged. Being
inventive means challenging the underlying assumption, and managing the process of
change with the bureaucracy.
A common theme emerged from the conference: A prerequisite for effective innovation
is to bring all stakeholders on the same page, and one way to achieve that is
through evidence-driven decision-making. If the 2010 Punjab school merger policy
had been tested before it was executed, policymakers may have accounted for
unintended negative impacts, perhaps by involving teachers at the policy
development stage. Policymakers too may have been less wedded to the idea and thus
more open to reassessment if glitches were spotted before too many resources were
spent on large-scale policy implementation.
Being committed to evidence-driven decision-making can lead to more effective
innovation. Now is the time to let the evidence speak for itself and guide our
choices, whether they rely on improving on current solutions or designing new ones
altogether.
In the light of the above, it may be concluded that the proposed SNC has not been
formulated in accordance with pedagogical imperatives of the development of a
child’s cognitive skills or to promote intellectual growth and social and economic
productivity. Instead, it has been designed to further religious nationalism,
homogenisation and centralism.
There is lip service to the ideas of diversity, inclusion and mutuality but, in
reality, a SNC that is gender-biased, sectarian and class-based, will sharpen
social differences, undermine minority religions and sects, and violate the
principles of federalism. There are a number of methodological problems related to
how it is to be implemented, given the lack of basic facilities, teacher training
and infrastructural deficiencies. As long as education is not declared a priority,
these problems will persist.
WAF Lahore rejects the SNC and its forced imposition on every province. WAF demands
that the government honour its commitment to provide free education responsive to
the social and economic needs of the time, and ensure quality based on a minimum
standard of education applicable to all school systems. While ensuring adequate
financial and infrastructural support, the government should involve educationists
and teachers with on-the-ground knowledge and experience of classroom contexts for
realistic and child-friendly educational policies.
Pakistan’s essential ethnic and religious diversity must be respected in any
educational process. To this end, WAF believes that the provinces should develop
their own curricula in line with their own histories and cultures, and in
accordance with the 18th Amendment of the Constitution.
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The Single National Curriculum (SNC) (2020)
