Around 20 million Pakistani children aged five to 16 are out of school. Article 25A of the Constitution guarantees them free and compulsory education, yet millions will reach adulthood without ever exercising that right. For these children, another decade of promises is not education policy. It is abandonment.
The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ Household Integrated Economic Survey 2024-25 puts the out-of-school rate at 28 percent. About 20 percent of all children aged five to 16 have never attended school, and another eight percent have dropped out. This is not primarily a dropout problem. Most out-of-school children have never entered a classroom.
Balochistan leaves 45 percent of its school-age children out, Sindh 39 percent and KPK 28 percent. Even Punjab, the best performer, leaves out roughly one child in five. Nationally, almost one girl in three is out of school.
Nine years of schooling, five years of learning
For children who do enrol, attendance is no guarantee of learning. The World Bank’s 2020 Human Capital Index puts expected schooling in Pakistan at 9.4 years, but learning-adjusted schooling at just 5.1. Time in school translates poorly into learning.
ASER Pakistan 2025 shows where the gaps begin. Only 52.3 percent of Class 5 children could read a Class 2 story in Urdu, Sindhi or Pashto, and only 49.6 percent could do two-digit division. In Class 3, the figures were 12.4 percent. Children move up through the grades without mastering the foundations that later learning depends on.
The economic cost reaches far beyond the education budget. Its estimated, the combined loss from children out of school and in school but not learning is $22 billion to $24 billion a year. That is roughly five to six percent of GDP. The estimate rests on three assumptions:
each year of genuine learning raises lifetime earnings by about 8 percent, in line with evidence for South Asia; around 60 percent of these children would enter paid work; future earnings are discounted at 5 percent a year.
It measures output Pakistan never produces, not money leaving the economy, and different assumptions would move the figure. The World Bank’s index points the same way. Its score of 0.41 means a child born here will grow up only 41 percent as productive as he/she could be with complete education and full health.
Against that, public education spending stood at Rs962 billion in FY2025, about 0.8 percent of GDP. Pakistan cannot expect a different educational future while committing so little to building it.
Children cannot wait a decade
The standard response is to build more schools, hire more teachers and improve administration. Those investments are necessary. But system-wide reform cannot be the only answer for children who are already years behind.
A five-year-old entering Class 1 needs a functioning primary school. A 12-year-old who has never attended needs a different entry point, a different pace and an achievable route forward. If child must wait another decade for the system to reach him or her they will be 22, and the school-age years will be gone.
One policy cannot serve both children. Pakistan needs two tracks, running at the same time, with different targets and different timelines.
Track one: catch up the children already left behind
The first track should be a five-year national catch-up initiative for children aged ten to 16 who are out of school or far behind. The provinces should run it, with federal support for financing, common learning benchmarks and coordination.
The initial target should be to bring ten million out-of-school children into recognised learning pathways within five years. There should be annual provincial targets and independently verified learning outcomes. Children admitted in the final years must be funded to finish and move on.
The programme should begin by assessing what each child knows, then group learners by need rather than age. Its first priorities are reading and writing in the mother tongue or Urdu, and practical arithmetic. Functional English and basic digital skills should follow. Older adolescents should have vocational options matched to local demand, which widen their choices rather than steer them out of education.
Bangladesh’s BRAC offers the precedent: community schools, locally recruited women teachers, continuing support and routes into mainstream education.
Three rules should govern track one:
No dead ends. Recognised qualifications must lead into mainstream schools, Matric, technical education or apprenticeships.
Use what exists. Afternoon shifts in government schools and community buildings can expand provision without waiting for new construction. Local teachers need training, coaching and reliable pay.
Pay for learning, not attendance. Assess children at entry, measure their progress independently, and publish results by district and gender. Funding should reward improvement from each child’s starting point, so providers gain nothing by selecting the easiest children to teach.
Track two: stop creating the backlog
The second track must repair mainstream schooling so the next generation does not need catching up. Without it, track one is bailing water from a boat that is still leaking.
The priority is the early grades. Teachers need structured lesson plans, reading materials and classroom coaching, not simply instructions to produce better results. Provinces should assess learning at Class 3 and Class 5, publish the results and direct support to struggling schools.
Teacher postings must follow need through transparent rules. Every school needs teachers who attend, drinking water, usable toilets and a secure environment. Stipends paid to mothers should support girls’ attendance and progression into secondary school. Families must not lose them because a school failed to teach their daughters.
The two tracks must connect. Catch-up graduates need places in mainstream schools, and better mainstream schools should steadily shrink the catch-up backlog. Funding should rise through a published, phased commitment to at least two percent of GDP. It should prioritise foundational teaching, girls and disadvantaged districts rather than administration.
Who benefits from failure
This crisis is not an accident of neglect. It persists because failure suits people with power. Politicians gain more from inaugurating buildings and controlling teacher postings than from children who can read. Bureaucracies prefer budgets they control to outcomes they must prove. The only losers are poor and rural parents, and they have no organised voice.
Publishing school-level learning results, alongside staffing and spending data, would give those parents and the media something to hold governments to.
Education is a provincial responsibility. Chief ministers should own both tracks and report publicly on learning gains and transitions, not enrolment alone.
Twenty million children are waiting for a route into education. Millions more sit in classrooms without acquiring the skills they need. Children already left behind need a second chance now. Those entering school need a system that does not fail them in the first place. Both are constitutional obligations, and both must begin today.
Fazeel Asif : The author is a policy analyst and former chairman of the Punjab Board of Investment and Trade . He can be reached out at : fazeel63@gmail.com