Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
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performance/track of teachers are not clear. Teachers’ career promotions do not necessarily link
to performance. It is also unclear who has hiring and firing powers as, during the devolution
transition, many staff members of districts are not aware of their own terms of reference, and the
other of members of national and provincial assemblies are undefined450.
Punjab is considered to be the leading province in education related reforms451 and teacher
rationalisation has been a goal of successive provincial governments in Punjab. The results were
not positive as the number of filled posts did not match sanctioned posts in any district in 2012.
In fact, the difference between filled and sanctioned posts was several thousand in some cases,
such as Faisalabad452. As a consequence, there are large numbers of single-teacher public schools
in Punjab which offer multi-grade teaching. The latter is very challenging and teachers may not
receive the necessary training and skills leading the quality of education provided to be seriously
affected.
Weak government supervision and coordination over private schools:
An important role and a large supply of private schools. Private sector schools play an important
role in education in Pakistan as low-fee private schools have flourished to fill in for shortages in
the supply of public schools. Students in private schools tend to perform better than students in
public schools (ASER 2015) and as such, private schools are generally considered to offer higher
quality education. The “English medium” makes them an attractive educational offer (even though
in reality these claims may not be fulfilled) for families who believe that it will open more jobs
opportunities upon graduation. One of the reasons of improved performance of students in low-
cost private schools over public school students is that teachers in the private sector can be (and
are) fired, unlike the public sector teachers. As such, the low-cost private school teachers are
incentivised to produce better results and provide higher teaching efforts even though they are
generally less educated and paid significantly less than public school teachers.
In Pakistan, for the year 2015-2016, 14% of all primary schools were in the private sector (with
86% of schools in the public sector)453. However, the share of enrolment by the private sector is
higher and stands at 39% of all enrolment at the primary level.
450 Alif Ailaan (2014)
451UNDP Pakistan “Education Governance Conundrum”
2/analysis--education--governance-conundrum.html
452UNDP Pakistan “Education Governance Conundrum”
453 AEPAM (2017)