Daily Times

LAHORE: As the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government’s second consecutive tenure in Punjab is about to end, the province is ambitiously reforming its school.

According to a report published in The Economist, In April 2016 private providers took over the running of 1,000 of the government’s primary schools, as a part of Punjab’s latest scheme for education. Today the number is 4,300. By the end of this year, Punjab Cheif Minister Shehbaz Sharif has decreed, it will be 10,000.

The chief minister calls education officials every three months to hear the progress.

Punjab Education Allah Bakhsh Malik Secretary told The Economist that About 30% of district education heads have been sacked for poor results in the past nine months.“We are working at Punjabi speed,” he added.

The data shared by The Economist shows Pakistani education has long been atrocious.Most Pakistani children who start school drop out by the age of nine; just 3% of those starting public school graduate from 12th grade, the final year,” said the secretary, adding that Pakistan’s gap between girls’ and boys’ enrolment is, after Afghanistan’s, the widest in South Asia.

Only about half of Pakistanis who complete five years of primary school are literate. In rural Pakistan just over two-fifths of third-grade students, typically aged 8 or 9, have enough grasp of arithmetic to subtract 25 from 54.

Many parents have turned away from the government school education. There are roughly 68,000 private schools in Pakistan (about one-third of all schools), up from 49,000 in 2007. Private money currently pays for more of Pakistan’s education than the government does.

It is in part the spread of private options that has spurred politicians like Sharif into action.

The Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), a quasi-independent body, oversees some of the largest school-privatisation and school-voucher programmes in the world. It has a seat with the ministers and administrators at Sharif’s quarterly meetings. The Punjab government no longer opens new schools; all growth is via these privately operated schools. Schools overseen by PEF now teach more than 3m children (an additional 11m or so remain in ordinary government-run schools).

Moreover, the Punjab government official said the government is committed to achieving all its targets regarding educational reforms in the set time span.