Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
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Teacher qualifications and training: Policy changes have led to a requirement for higher
qualifications prior to recruitment. The Alif Ailaan survey found that 69%of government teachers
and 75% of private school teachers report completing either a bachelor’s or master’s degree458.
However, as seen earlier, the major of the teachers’ degree often fails to match the subject they
are assigned to teach in school. These mismatched skills combined with very low quality pre-
service training result in teachers lacking the subject knowledge as well as fundamental
teaching/pedagogical techniques necessary459. In-service training is sporadic and has also been
largely of poor quality. Teachers are therefore not well trained nor highly motivated.
Given the poor pre-service and in-service training, only 42% of teachers in public schools report
having knowledge of the National Curriculum (and as little as 9% in Balochistan)460 . Teachers
simply apply the rote learning approach in the classroom and rely on textbooks and ‘teaching to
the test’. Teachers do not know how to teach critical thinking and other cognitive skills that are
vital to quality education. In a positive development, Punjab has improved the in-service training
system and other provinces are adapting this model to their own needs.
Learning environments: The quality of the basic infrastructure of public schools is widely
regarded as very poor and unequal across the country. As high as 40% of public sector primary
schools were operating without electricity, 28%did not have toilets, 25%were without boundary
walls and 29%had no access to drinking water461. Some 7%of schools did not even have buildings
and 43% had unsatisfactory buildings462. The overall dismal school environments are a major
barrier to quality education and decrease the parents’/children’s incentives to enrol and remain
in schools.
Supply-side: Education Financing
Resources invested: room for improvement: Historically, Pakistan’s overall national
expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP has remained around 2%. Given the country’s
substantial spending on defence, interest payments and energy needs, expenditure on the
remaining sectors, particularly on social services such as health and education, are tightly
constrained. Pakistan ranks 177th, globally, in terms of public spending on education. Both the
low levels of education spending and the ways in which the funds are spent contribute to
explaining poor educational outcomes in terms of access and quality. With federal education
spending as a percentage of total government spending standing at 7-10% in the past few years,
education spending is higher at the provincial than at the federal level (see . However,
allocations remain inadequate to meet the size of the educational challenges facing the country.
458 Alif Ailaan (2014)
459 Alif Ailaan (2014)
460 Alif Ailaan (2014)
461 AEPAM (2017)
462 Pakistan Education Statistics quoted in
report