Daily Times

LAHORE: Alif Ailan’s report titled 2013-2018 Five Years Of Education Reform – Punjab Wins, Losses & Challenges For The Future 2018-2023 has revealed that regardless of increased quantum of budget allocation for education, the Punjab government was unable to utilise the budget for improving learning outcomes.

Besides a number of initiatives, there are still 9.91 million children out of school in Punjab. However, the report revealed that the government was able to increase the enrollment in middle and high schools but that also at a very low pace because in four years’s time, only 0.5 million students were enrolled in middle and 0.2 million students were enrolled in high schools. The report was launched on Wednesday at a ceremony held at the Chief Minister Secretariat. The report which focuses more on the reforms done by Punjab government in its five year tenure also explained challenges for the next five years for Punjab.

Interestingly, the report presented highlights from Alif Ailan’s District Education Ranking which has shown that Lahore, despite being the largest city of Punjab and with huge amounts of developmental budge invested in it, is lagging behind the smaller cities of the province.

According to the Punjab Examination Commission (PEC), in the results of grade 5 students, Lahore stands at #36 and in the results for grade 8, Lahore stands at #35.

Even in infrastructure development, Lahore’s standing is very poor. It stands at #15 in primary school and #21 among middle school infrastructure.

The report revealed that since 2013, Punjab’s education budget had increased from Rs 232 billion to Rs 345 billion. While this increase has led to incremental improvements in physical infrastructure, quality of faculty and student enrolments, it is still insufficient to fully address the problems confronting the sector.

The reason Punjab needs to be more sensitive to the quality of spending is the sheer quantum of its size, and resultantly, the size of public funds that pass through the government of Punjab.

Over the last five years, whilst allocations have increased, utilisation has fallen. This is indicative both of a capacity problem and a planning problem. The most likely cause for poor utilisation is the mismatch between the education policy and reforms agenda, and the traditional, incremental budgetary approach that dominates the public sector.

There is also a pressing need to ensure that allocated amounts are spent both comprehensively and efficiently to ensure that they do not lapse.

Alif Ailan’s report synthesised efforts of the Punjab government in four key areas to assess policy achievements between 2013 to 2018. These four areas included better government schools, better quality of education, improved data regimes and budget allocations.

The government has invested in the most complex and ambitious set of education reforms around human resource management, school infrastructure and overall education sector governance that have produced positive outcomes over the past five years. However, significant challenges in actualising reform ambitions continue to persist. The Punjab Education Sector Reform Programme and School Education Reforms Roadmap provide a holistic strategy for achieving systemic sectoral improvements over the last five years. These reforms put a special emphasis on higher enrolment and retention, improved learning outcomes and quality of education, and a better managed, monitored and administered education sector.

Among the better government schools, the report further discuss eight different areas. The report highlighted that the the percentage of schools with at least one toilet facility has risen from 71.8 percent in 2013 to 97.3 percent in 2017, while those with a boundary wall increased from 86.3 percent to 89.9 percent in the same period. Overall, based on Alif Ailan’s composite school infrastructure assessment from the district education rankings, Punjab’s overall score registered an increase of five points between 2013 and 2017, rising from 83.4 to 88.4. Punjab has witnessed a steady increase in enrolment figures; with primary school Net Enrolment Rate (NER) rising from 45 percent in 2001 to 70 percent by the end of 2016. However, the NER has largely remained stagnant during the past five years. The NER represents an oft-contested metric, in part because it underrepresents the total number of children enrolled in schools. This critique is supported by the increase in the total number of children enrolled in primary school, from 4.96 million in 2013 to 5.46 million in 2017.

In a good move, as per the report, Punjab has succeeded in managing the gender gaps among schools. From an absolute gender gap in enrolment of 0.67 million students, it has fallen to 0.38 million students over a four year period.

In total, female enrolment across all three tiers of schooling rose from 3.74 million students in 2013 to 4.26 million in 2017.

Talking about poor utilisation of a huge budget, the report claimed that increases to the budget that do not generate better learning outcomes are increasingly being identified as a source of fiduciary risk. Punjab has successfully increased the quantum of allocations over the last five years, but the ability of the province to utilise those budgets and more importantly, to utilise them in a manner that produces better learning outcomes is critical.

Punjab has achieved remarkable progress in enrolment and retention at primary school level. However, the sustained success of these reforms is contingent on dramatic improvements in the availability of similar capacity, at the middle school, high school and higher secondary school levels. Improvements in primary school enrolment have not been accompanied by similar rates of increase in enrolment at other tiers of schooling.

While in improved learning outcomes the report’s facts were alarming as it said that there is still extensive work required to further improve the quality of education in both public and private institutions. The gains recorded in recent years remain insufficient, especially at middle school level. PEC scores in maths and science for grade 8 students show nominal improvements in student performance in three rounds of testing since 2015. Barring reasonable student performance in Urdu and Islamiyat, where the average student score was 73 percent in 2017, maths, science and English scores continue to be areas of persisting weakness with average scores around the 50 percent mark.

The report also mentioned that among all cities of Punjab, Lahore has the largest number of students enrolled in private schools with a number of 1,305,687 students in private schools. However, among government schools, most of the students enrolled were in Faisalabad with a number of 820,005.

The report at the end has provided a five point agenda for the next five years for improvement which demanded government to work for improved quantum, efficiency and governance of education spending, secondly, learning outcomes in public and private schools. Thirdly, developing a comprehensive and transparent data regime, fourthly, improved human resource management and fifthly, focus on children with special needs.

Published in Daily Times, March 8^th 2018.