March for education in Pakistan

Pakistan Education Task Force (PEFT) has issued its report titled ‘the Education Emergency Pakistan Booklet’ as part of its March for Education campaign to improve education in Pakistan. Here are the excerpts:

TODAY, Pakistan is crippled by an education emergency that threatens tens of millions of children. No country can thrive in the modern world without educated citizens.

But the emergency has disastrous human, social and economic consequences, and threatens the security of the country. 2011 is Pakistan’s Year of Education. It’s time to think again about Pakistan’s most pressing long-term challenge.

The 18th Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan received Presidential assent on 19 April 2010. For the first time, education is no longer a privilege, but a fundamental right for all children: The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years in such manner as may be determined by law.

Along with the rest of the world, Pakistan has also pledged to meet the Millennium Development Goal for education, promising that, by 2015: Children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling and that girls and boys will have equal access to all levels of education.

Today, Pakistan is far from meeting its international education obligations. At least, seven million children are not in primary school. That’s around as many people as live in the city of Lahore. Three million will never see the inside of a classroom at all.

Imagine a city full of children – the size of Faisalabad – where every child is deprived of the opportunity even to start his or her education. This is a challenge of global dimensions. Roughly one in ten of the world’s primary-age children who are not in school live, in Pakistan, placing Pakistan second in the global ranking of out-of-school children.

The Millennium Development Goal for education is now out of reach.

As the United Nations recently reminded governments, all of today’s primary-age children would need to have started school by 2009, if they are to complete their studies by 2015. The Government of Pakistan accepts there is now too much to be done, in too short a time, to meet the MDG:

This realisation that the targets will not be met does not deter the government from working to achieve (them). Rather it spurs it on to rectify the shortfalls and to make the commitment, that it will move as close to the targets for 2015, as it possibly can.

A sharp acceleration is needed if the education MDG is to be met within ten years. At current rates of progress, full primary enrolment may not be achieved before mid-century. Pakistan is even further from fulfilling its constitutional duty to provide all children an education up to the age of 16, with only 23 percent enrolment in secondary school. Today, around 25 million children are denied this justiciable right. Under a business-as-usual scenario, Pakistan risks not achieving universal education to the age of 16 in the lifetime of anyone who is alive today. In Pakistan, access to education is exceedingly unevenly distributed. The richest 20 percent of Pakistan citizens receive almost seven years more education than the poorest.

But the most privileged do best of all, with the rich sending their children to elite private schools and often overseas for higher education. According to UNESCO, meanwhile, 30 percent of Pakistanis live in extreme educational poverty – having received less than two years of education. This figure rises to almost half of the population of the province that suffers the most extreme educational deprivation – Balochistan. Pakistan has only 94 women for every 100 men, one of the most unequal distributions in the world. This entrenched inequality is reflected in, and perpetuated by, the education system. Fewer than half of women have ever been to school, and just 35 percent of those living in rural areas. But the education of women is one of the most important investments a society can make. Educated women have smaller families, with a year’s education reducing fertility by 10percent. Their children are healthier, and also better educated, as they use their own education to nurture the next generation.

Pakistan has known many natural disasters. In 2010, it experienced devastating floods – one of the worst calamities in the country’s history. Shocked by the scale of the damage done to people’s lives, the whole country mobilised in response, assisted by the international community. But the failure to provide education is, without doubt, our most urgent self-inflicted disaster. One year of additional education for the workforce translates into hundreds of billion rupees in greater output, making the economic impact is as serious as suffering repeated floods. We therefore have a duty to respond to this manmade emergency with equal force and urgency. It is easy to believe that Pakistan is too poor to afford to tackle its education emergency. But this is not true. Some of the poorest countries in the world have more children in primary schools than Pakistan. Neither has Pakistan kept pace with the other countries in its region. India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh are all on track to meet their education Millennium Development Goal. Bangladesh has improved access to primary schooling at double the rate seen in Pakistan over the past 20 years. India is reducing the number of young children out of school at ten times the rate seen in Pakistan.

Pakistan is committed to spending at least 4 percent of GDP on education, but budgets have fallen in recent years – from 2.5 percent in 2006/07 to 2 percent in 2009/10.

The picture grows even bleaker when one looks at actual expenditure, with some provinces spending as little as 60 percent of their education budgets last year.

As fiscal pressures grow, it seems likely that actual education expenditure will dip significantly below the 2 percent benchmark.

Primary and secondary schools probably received less than 68 percent of government expenditure on education (although no-one knows for sure how much money is spent on the school system). That’s less than 1.5 percent of GDP going to public schools that are on the front line of Pakistan’s education emergency, or less than the subsidy for PIA, Pakistan Steel, and PEPCO.

Parents have been quick to react to the failure of the public school system to offer their children an education. According to government statistics for 2008/2009, nearly 30 percent of students study in private schools, and another 6 percent in Madrassas.

However, these figures probably underestimate the explosive growth of the non-government sector. A recent household survey found that, even in rural areas, more a quarter of children are now educated privately. It seems certain that a majority of urban children now go to low-cost private schools.

The willingness of parents to pay demonstrates how badly most want education for their children. In a survey of villages in Punjab, parents were spending 155 rupees on education every month for each child in public schools, and 231 rupees for each child in private schools.

The average rural family, with four or more children, dedicates 13 percent of its income to public education, or 20 percent if they have made the choice to educate privately. Rural parents are also sophisticated judges of the quality of the education their children receive. Even illiterate parents can accurately identify ‘good schools’ in their area (where students perform best when tested) – though literate mothers are the most perceptive judges of all. National opinion surveys confirm the strength of the public’s appetite for education. In a 2009 poll, 85 percent of those questioned stated that:

* Education makes people better citizens.

* Education helps citizens elect more effective leaders.

* Education reduces extremism.

90 percent believe that education is about more than preparing students to get better jobs. Education also helps children become ‘better’ human beings.

The appetite for education is also growing. Today, 86 percent of people think boys need to go to college compared to 56 percent twenty years ago. The change has been even faster for girls, with 59 percent believing they should get a college education, compared to just 15percent in 1981.

When judging schools, parents are partly driven by concern about poor facilities.

National data does not exist for private schools, but only 36 percent of public schools are judged to be in a satisfactory condition.

Over 30,000 schools need major repairs or are in a dangerous condition, while 21,045 schools have no buildings at all.

Many schools also lack basic facilities. Just:

* 65 percent have drinking water.

* 62 percent have a latrine.

* 61 percent a boundary wall.

* 39 percent have electricity.

Safe schools, with decent facilities, clearly contribute to learning, but parents have another even more important priority. Surveys show that, for rural parents, the quality of the education is more than twice as important as the quality of a school’s buildings. And an overwhelming majority of parents see teaching as the key determinant of quality, with 65 percent saying that ‘dedicated teachers’ are their top priority, compared to 11 percent who would prefer to have ‘good facilities’. Nearly 80 percent of parents would rate a school as ‘good’ or ‘very good’ even if it had:

A roof that leaks, a broken boundary wall and desks, no free textbooks or school supplies, but teachers who were always present and highly motivated.

Pakistan has 1.5 million teachers, with their salaries accounting for the vast majority of both public and private expenditure on education. Teachers in government schools are relatively well paid. Even similarly qualified private school teachers are paid less than a third of what their counterparts in the public sector receive. A teacher in a government school also earns 4.5 times as much as the average per capita household income for Pakistan. Higher wages, however, are not translating into more committed teaching. On a given day, 15-20 percent of public sector teachers will not be in the classroom, leaving children without a teacher for one day a week. Absenteeism rates for private sector teachers are lower – in some studies considerably so. Unfortunately, parental demand for quality education is not being satisfied. Literacy levels of young people are low, with 31 percent of men and 41 percent of women aged 15-24 years unable to read or write. A detailed study of the educational achievement of rural children suggests these findings may overstate performance. It finds that only 35 percent of school children, aged 6-16, can read a story, while 50 percent cannot read a sentence.

Their performance is only slightly better than that of out-of-school children, of whom 24 percent can read a story. A study of children in rural Punjab supports these findings – fewer than a third can answer simple comprehension questions after reading a paragraph in Urdu. Despite the enormity of Pakistan’s education challenge, change is possible. International experience demonstrates how rapidly change can come:

* Chile increased its primary enrolment from 74 percent to 95 percent in under twenty years.

* The Indian state of Madhya Pradesh taught an additional 2.5 million Grade 5 children to read in just two years.

* In Minas Gerais, Brazil, the literacy rate among 8 year olds jumped from 49 percent to 73 percent just three years after a reform programme was launched.

If Pakistan followed the path forged by other pioneers of education reform, it could expect to start seeing results within two years.

A concern for education is deeply rooted in Pakistan’s history. In 1947, in his message to the All-Pakistan Education Conference, the Quaid-e-Azam warned that:

The future of our State will and must greatly depend upon the type of education and the way in which we bring up our children as the future servants of Pakistan. The Conference agreed that Pakistan should provide free and compulsory education to all children. Since then Pakistan has had nine further education policies, each of which has set similar targets. None of these policies has yet attracted the sustained political will needed to turn aspirations into better education.

According to a study of the world’s fastest improving school systems, three factors are most likely to trigger a successful programme of education reform:

* A political or economic crisis.

* The impact of a high-profile, critical report on the education system’s performance.

* The energy of a determined political or education leader (or both).

Of these three factors, leadership is the most important ‘secret ingredient’ for translating good education policies into results.

In the face of such a dire emergency, leaders at every level – from the prime minister and chief ministers, to the head teachers in each school – will need to work together to create an education system that delivers. In the medium term, Pakistan will need to spend more money on education if it is to meet its education goals.

Given current fiscal pressures, the main priority is to ensure funding for education is sustained in the 2011-12 budget. Looking forward, however, education must be built into Pakistan’s growth strategy, recognising the vital role that human capital will play in ensuring prosperity and security.

The best available estimates suggest that around 80-100 million rupees is needed per year to reach the education MDG, a 50 percent increment on today’s expenditure. A much greater increase will be needed to provide education for all 5-16 year olds, fulfilling Clause 25a of the Constitution.

On 11 December 2010, Prime Yousaf Raza Gilani announced that 2011 would be celebrated as the Year of Education. Chief ministers, meanwhile, have been responding to the 18th Amendment to the Constitution which gives provinces full responsibility for providing schooling to all children. That is why we believe March should be the month that Pakistan talks about only two things: education and cricket. And why we must heed the impending disaster that the emergency threatens and turn the Year of Education into a decade of delivery for all. *

Source: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011\03\09\story_9-3-2011_pg7_26
Published: Wednesday, March 09, 2011