Every Child Reading: What Pakistan Can Learn from East Asia

What is Learning Poverty? The proportion of 10-year-old children who cannot read and understand a simple, age-appropriate paragraph. As reading is the foundation for all learning and an indicator of the health of an education system global institutions are having valid concerns about the learning outcomes of Pakistan’s Educational system.

The World Bank’s focus on improving Pakistan’s social/financial structure & particularly the education system is commendable. The author’s participation in the captioned presentation by Toby Linden, (Lead Economist, World Bank) at Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) ignited the spark to review Pakistan’s education system, its contribution to learning poverty and remedies to come out of this bleak situation.

Currently, Pakistan has the world's second-highest number of out-of-school children (OOSC) with an estimated 22.8 million children aged 5-16 not attending school. (UNESCO,2023).

The current data validates that Pakistan has about?182,600 functional primary schools, 46,800 middle schools, 34,800 secondary schools, 7,648 higher/ secondary/intermediate colleges, and 3,729 technical and vocational institutes?in the country. Pakistan has over 200 universities and 3,000 degree colleges across the country.

While taking a snapshot of Pakistan’s spending on education, the total outlay of federal and provincial education budgets has increased by 37 per cent in the past five years, underspend remains a recurrent and significant issue. Pakistan spends 1.7 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education.

?? This level of investment is low when compared to the international norm of a 4 per cent minimum, or the international standard of allocating 20 per cent of the total budget to education. In 2022-2023, budget allocation for education was consistent with the 20 per cent benchmark only in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK). This conceals the fact that almost all provinces miss huge opportunities for making steady progress year-on-year due to the underutilization of allocated budgets.

After the 18th amendment, education has been devolved to provinces. Comparative analyses of Provencal spending for public sector education reveal the pattern of spending for education i.e. Baluchistan 17%, KPK 21%, Punjab 16%, Sindh 20%. This pattern reveals the priority of different provinces for education. Along with the provincial spending, the federal government allocated?175 Billion PKR?to the Education Sector in 2023.

Despite of this heavy spending why Pakistan is suffering from learning poverty? As per the data revealed by the global institutions the current improvement trend of learning poverty, it will take 136 years to achieve this objective.

?Where is the basic problem rooted? ?Do we need the overhaul the entire educational system or do we need to concentrate on a few KPIs? In the later part of this article, we will analyze the reasons for learning poverty.

Teachers perform an instrumental role in fostering the reading culture. Unluckily the induction of teachers is enormously politicized which results in the induction of incompetent teachers. These dishonest or incompetent teachers are the key figure behind the learning poverty in Pakistan. ?Teachers matter the most for learning in school. Teacher quality instrumentally impacts the learning performance of students. While going through the current literature regarding the education system of the developed countries it’s revealed they have stringent parameters for induction of teachers for various level educational institutes.

In principle, three ways to improve teacher quality in Pakistan that will in return bring learning prosperity to their students. Teachers must be inducted on a 2-year contract base and a contract should be stringently renewed after a careful performance analysis of the contract person.

Employing meritocratic, learning-focused selection and strengthening the teacher selection process is the key to inducting “fit for the purpose” aspirants in the education system. To make the induction A-politicised, reliable boards like The Agha Khan board should be assigned to scrutinize the candidates and recommend them for hiring for various levels of teaching institutes.

Attracting strong candidates (salaries, career paths) should be considered as the core job of selection boards. Having job fairs in top-rated universities will help to identify the high-potential candidates to be hired as teachers at different levels.

Enhance teachers’ capacity through on-the-job pieces of training for every two hundred students there should be a teacher’s trainer who must be qualified from some W-category university possessing outstanding training and administrative skills. He must be authorized to contribute to the appraisal of teachers.

Encouraging greater teacher effort by incentivizing outstanding performers could bring in an appreciable contribution in terms of improving the academic take-home of the students. Fairly identifying the out-performing teachers and rewarding them will prove to be key to dealing with the current issue of learning poverty.

Structured lesson plans and targeted instruction are essential tools for educators,?aiding in imparting knowledge, skills, and competencies. They guide content delivery, organization, communication, and assessment. Through careful planning, educators engage students with accessible content, align activities with objectives, and ensure relevance.

In a nutshell, meritocratic induction, on-the-job training, structured lesson plans and stringent vigilance for achieving the KPIs are all that can deliver the required results to deal with the problem of learning poverty in Pakistan.