Education roundup 2025 |
AS another year ends, it is worth looking back and taking stock of significant developments in Pakistan’s education sector. While many small-scale interventions and pilot projects are ongoing, I will restrict my review to wide-scale developments that are more likely to have a perceptible impact, good or bad.
The widely quoted figure of 25 million out-of-school children, the one that prompted this government to announce an “education emergency,” has been bumped up to an estimated 26m. Meanwhile, public spending on education remains stuck at 0.8 per cent of GDP. Instead, according to a news report just this week, the government’s best idea is to gently twist private businesses’ arm to make them pledge one per cent of their profits for the cause of education, presumably because levied taxes (paid or evaded) and additional costs of doing business in this country are not high enough. Never has a country, certainly no country of a quarter billion souls, righted its ship of public education on the back of corporate charitable giving.
For a positive development, the national Inter Boards Coordination Commission (IBCC) announced a notable increase in flexibility. SSC and HSSC students will now be able to select individual subjects, instead of being restricted to pre-set tracks, ie arts, (general) science, pre-engineering, and pre-medical, like in many other foreign school systems. Students advancing to HSSC will not be constrained in their choice by what SSC subjects they took, ie anyone who opted for arts subjects at the SSC level could still take subjects needed for admission........