Sindh’s relatively better education spending still doesn’t cut it, claims study

A recent study reveals that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Azad Jammu & Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan have relatively better retention rates than Sindh and Balochistan, with the newly merged districts in KP being the exception.

Authored by Asim Bashir Khan, an economist and part of the Institute of Business Administration’s teaching faculty, the study titled ‘Bringing all the girls to school: a case for more investment’ was published by the Pakistan Coalition for Education and the Pakistan Youth Change Advocates in collaboration with many other NGOs.

The study shows that Sindh and Punjab have 38,132 and 36,900 primary schools respectively, but girls’ enrolment in Sindh is 2,398,592, which is less than half of Punjab’s 5,465,564.

The comparison between the two provinces also shows that while Sindh has around 3 per cent more primary schools than Punjab, the enrolment ratio is 100 students per school in the former while it’s 227 per school in the latter. The difference grows wider when it comes to girls’ enrolment. For every 100 girls enrolled in Sindh, 289 are enrolled in Punjab.

The situation of girls’ education in rural areas across Pakistan paints a very grim picture. Only 15 per cent of the girls who enrolled in grade-I in 1993 were able to graduate from secondary schools in 2017. Sindh, Balochistan and former FATA districts rank among the lowest performers with retention rates of 9, 8 and 7 per cent respectively.

Countrywide scenario

Currently, 22.8 million children aged 5-16 years in Pakistan are out of school. This figure represents 44 per cent of the total population in this age group and amounts to the second largest population of out-of-school children (OOSC) in the world.

Around 10.7 million boys and 8.6 million girls are enrolled at primary levels, but these figures drop to a mere 3.6 million and 2.8 million at lower secondary levels.

Of the 22.8 million OOSC in Pakistan, 53 per cent are girls and 47 per cent boys. The present enrolment of girls between 5 and 16 years from grades I to X in public schools is 7.73 million and the number of OOSC is 8.96 million.

Moreover, the number of public schools for girls is much lesser than that for boys. On the whole, there are 78,601 primary schools for boys compared to only 40,548 for girls in Pakistan. Similarly, there are 15,902 secondary schools for boys against 13,012 secondary schools for girls, while against 976 higher secondary schools for boys, the number of girls’ schools is 722.

Where Sindh stands

These statistics show that 37.3 per cent of the girls of primary school-going ages are currently not attending school. The number of out-of-school girls in Sindh, Balochistan, GB and former FATA districts is more than the those in school at primary levels.

The author says that although Sindh’s spending on education is much higher than that of FATA, KP and Balochistan, the situation of out-of-school girls in Sindh is not much better compared to the lowest performing regions of Pakistan.

A closer look at the spatial distribution reveals that two-thirds of the out-of-school girls in Pakistan, both at primary and secondary levels, are based in Sindh and Punjab: approximately one-third in each province, adds the author.

Ratio of primary schools

“Despite the fact that majority of the primary and secondary schools and the bulk of public investment on education is concentrated in the rural areas,” reads the report, “female drop-out rates in rural areas are much higher than those in urban centres. A sharp increase in girls’ drop-out is especially evident in rural districts after grade-V.”

The total number of primary schools in urban areas is 10,843, which is around a tenth of the 108,306 primary schools in rural areas. This means that for every 100 schools in urban areas, there are 999 schools in rural areas. Similarly, the total number of secondary schools in urban areas is 5,257, which is slightly more than a fifth of the 23,747 secondary schools in rural areas.

As the overall national average shows, the situation across the country is poor. However, the bottleneck in Sindh is worse with only 10 secondary schools for every 100 primary schools. A further breakdown of the province’s situation reveals that for every 100 primary schools in urban areas, there are 34 secondary schools, while there are merely eight secondary schools for every 100 primary schools in rural areas.

The ranking based on the disparity of primary and secondary schools shows Balochistan, former FATA districts and Sindh to be the poorest performers, while GB, Islamabad Capital Territory and Punjab show reasonably decent parity.

Talking to The News, the study’s author said that to fulfil the state’s constitutional commitment under Article 25-A, the number of secondary schools needs an increase across the country.

He, however, said the governments of Sindh, KP and Balochistan will have to allocate a major chunk of their development spending to construct more secondary schools or upgrade existing schools, so children in those provinces have a level playing field when graduating from primary to secondary levels.

Student-teacher ratio

An urban-rural comparison of primary schools shows that those in lesser developed regions of the country are likely to have fewer teachers, especially at rural level. Balochistan, for instance, has an average of two teachers per school in urban areas and one teacher per school in rural areas. However, per school enrolment in Sindh’s urban areas is nearly half, and in rural areas it’s one-third of that in Punjab.

This simple comparison suggests that while more financial resources are certainly required for expanding the system, existing structures are also underutilised in terms of accommodating OOSC.

The situation is only very slightly better for Sindh, GB, AJK and former FATA districts with an average of between two to six teachers in urban and only two teachers in primary schools of rural areas.