PAKISTAN declared an education emergency on 8 May 2024, the Prime Minister undertaking to supervise it personally and to bring some 26 million out-of-school children into classrooms. That December the federation issued a National Education Policy Development Framework; in January this year, the thirty-eighth Inter-Provincial Education Ministers Conference unanimously endorsed a National Education Emergency Action Plan. In barely two years, then, a declaration, a framework and a plan — for a system Pakistan no longer nationally administers. Since the Eighteenth Amendment, the federation may announce priorities, convene ministers and publish targets, yet teachers, schools and budgets through which those targets must be met remain provincial. The question is not whether these ambitions are desirable. It is whether anyone can be held responsible for delivering them.

The constitutional arithmetic is unambiguous. The Eighteenth Amendment of 2010 abolished the Concurrent Legislative List and its forty-seven subjects, transferring education to federating units. In the same amendment, Article 25-A made free and compulsory education for children aged five to sixteen a fundamental right binding upon the State — but the State that recruits teachers, prints textbooks and pays salaries is now, overwhelmingly, provincial one.

What the federation retained is narrow and largely coordinative standards in higher education and research institutions, the federally administered territories, and forums such as the Council of Common........

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