It has been over two years since the country declared a National Education Emergency, but Pakistan is still stuck with the second-largest out-of-school population globally. A new comprehensive comparative policy review, prepared by the Civil Services Academy (CSA) and reported on by the media earlier this week, estimates that between 25.1 million and 26 million school-age children are currently out of school. The CSA review warns that without addressing systemic data and governance gaps, even increased spending will fail to produce measurable improvements. The review also claims that the education crisis is not so much down to a lack of policy formulation, with all the provinces having prepared detailed roadmaps under the National Education Action Plan (NEAP) 2026, as it is to an inability to execute policy.
Why is the problem not as simple as spending more money and ensuring that there are enough schools for all children? For one, not all children are out of school for the same reason. Children with disabilities might not be able to attend because nearby schools do not have the facilities they need, while girls might not attend because schools lack female teachers. In other cases, it might be that children start going to school but eventually drop out because of financial pressures or because families do not see schooling as beneficial when it fails to translate into skills, employment or mobility, something experts point to as a key issue. The nature of the out-of-school phenomenon also varies by province or region. Student retention is a major issue in Punjab and Sindh: 3.16 million children drop out after initial enrolment in the former, while the latter has only 2,634 middle schools and 1,674 secondary schools compared to 36,000 primary schools. The shortage of female teachers is highlighted as a major problem in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa while geography and terrain emerge as a key issue in Balochistan, with children often travelling up to 360 kilometres to get to secondary school. A one-size-fits-all approach will clearly not solve this problem.
A working paper published by the World Bank Group earlier this year reached a similar conclusion. This also shows how the education crisis intersects with other national problems, in this case, the gaping hole that is Pakistan’s local governance. The CSA review recommends establishing autonomous district education authorities with financial and administrative powers to improve accountability and responsiveness at the local level. None of this means that major national-level problems are unimportant. The review notes that extremely low public investment in education is common across all provinces and also identifies rapid population growth and entrenched poverty as key drivers that have allowed the number of children excluded from formal schooling to grow over time. It also highlights the absence of a reliable national database, which has allowed millions of children to remain invisible to the system, with provinces relying on outdated census figures or fragmented administrative records. One can now begin to understand why the out-of-school number is proving so hard to bring down. This specific problem requires multiple approaches and changes at the local, provincial, and national levels. Acting both in concert and with flexibility seems to elude national policymakers.
Editorial Published in The News, July 9th, 2026.
