A school should be the last place where parents fear for their children’s lives. Yet the deaths of 31 students and a teacher in Peshawar’s Al-Khair School roof collapse is an incident that should spring authorities into action. In a country where educational institutions are expected to shape the future, even the most basic guarantee of physical safety remains uncertain.
The tragedy reflects a wider culture of negligence in which structural safety is overlooked until a building collapses and innocent lives are lost. That an apparently weakened structure could be burdened with additional construction – even as children continued to attend classes – raises questions that cannot be answered through expressions of grief alone. More troubling is the frequency with which such disasters occur. The deaths of 14 children in a Lahore tuition centre collapse earlier this year should have prompted a comprehensive reassessment of school building safety. Instead, another tragedy has followed, suggesting that lessons are neither being learnt nor translated into preventive measures. The problem lies as much with regulatory indifference as with those who compromise construction standards to save costs. Private educational institutions cannot be allowed to operate in buildings whose structural integrity has never been properly established. Equally, the authorities responsible for granting permissions and monitoring compliance cannot escape scrutiny when their oversight proves ineffective. A school licence must represent an assurance of safety rather than merely permission to conduct business.
Compensation may provide some financial relief to grieving families, but it is no substitute for accountability. Nor can official promises restore the trust shattered by such an entirely preventable disaster. The government must abandon its reactive approach to public safety and establish a system in which dangerous buildings are identified before they become death traps. Until that happens, the state’s repeated assurances about protecting children will ring hollow. Education is a fundamental right, but that right becomes meaningless if children must risk their lives merely to exercise it.
Editorial Published in The Express Tribune on Oct 16th, 2026.
