Challenges in Education in Pakistan

A webinar was held on 06 January 2021 on “Challenges in Education in Pakistan” under the auspices of the Karachi Council on Foreign Relations (KCFR) with honourable Shafqat Mahmood, Federal Minister for Education, Professional Training, and National Heritage & Culture participating. Chaired by Ikram Sehgal Chairman KCFR, the event was moderated by CEO KCFR, Cdre (Retd) Sadeed A. Malik.

Cdre Malik welcomed the honourable Shafqat Mahmood, Federal Minister for Education, Professional Training, National Heritage & Culture saying it was a great pleasure and honour to welcome him. By and large this webinar is going to be one of the most important webinars by KCFR as it is on the subject of Education which is the base for development and increase in GDP of any country. This is what the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher has said and was repeated by two of her followers, Mr. John Majors and Mr. Tony Blair. In the Far East this was again repeated by Lee Kwan Yun and Mahathir the Prime Minister of Malaysia. That is the reason that these small countries have a greater GDP than Pakistan whereas we are nearly 3 to 4 times more populated than these countries. Before I come to the webinar I would like to inform the Honourable Minister and the participants very briefly about KCFR. Sir, KCFR is a prominent think at Karachi since 2003 which deliberates mainly in the fields of foreign relations and economic affairs. Late former Chief Justice Pakistan and Governor Sindh Mr. Saeeduzzaman Siddiqui was our founding Chairman, former Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Shahid Karimullah and former Federal Minister Lt Gen Moinuddin Haider have also been our Chairmen. A number of former ministers, Generals, Admirals, intellectuals and a large number of elite captains of businesses and industries and services in Karachi are our members. We keep holding seminars on various national and international issues and our recommendations and proceedings are forwarded to the ministries. We also conjoin with a number of institutions internationally and we have signed MOUs with about 12 international institutions. Sir, I had volunteered to moderate this very important webinar firstly because I have known you since you were in Government College Science and later when you visited the submarines, I am a retired Naval Officer and you had visited the submarine squadron. Being a submarine I had a career, I was the instructor at the Naval Academy and then I became the Commandant there and in this time I was also appointed as Member Academic Council of Karachi University, I also headed the Pakistan Navy Education Trust which has over 40000 students, Bahria College with few thousand students and now I have the honour to inform you that I was initiated the Bahria University which is now contributing nationally. Having said this Sir, you were to be welcomed by our Board of Governors Member Haji Rafiq Pardesi but unfortunately he is travelling right now and is unable to do so. On behalf of the Chairman, Members Board of Governors and all participants I would like to welcome you to this very important webinar.

Sir, after your plenary address we will have a Question and Answers session.

Thank you Mr. Anwar. Ladies and gentlemen first let me begin by thanking you for inviting me to this event. It is an opportunity that I always welcome because education unfortunately has not been in the forefront of our national psyche, we all say and always repeat that education is the best thing but over the last 73 years the State has not invested in education as it should have and therefore there are a lot of problems and challenges that we face. There are other challenges we are facing and those are how to continue education during the COVID emergency and I will begin by talking about this challenge, then I will speak about the other areas which are challenging and I will give you a brief description of what we have done over the last two and a half years and what we are planning to do.

Apart from the overall situation prevailing we were suddenly faced with the unprecedented situation of the coronavirus emergency and because there was no experience of how to tackle this, even our Constitution did not have any mechanism in the field of education to suggest that in case of an emergency how the State would go about handling that emergency. So we stepped forward and made a functional and effective organisation called Intra Provincial Education Ministers Conference and through that we have been taking some fundamental decisions such as when to close schools, when to open schools, etc. Last year we took a major decision of promotion students of classes 9, 10, 11 and 12 without holding examinations which was not an easy decision. We were also confronted with the challenge that if the educational institutions are closed, how do we make up for it, how do we have some education continuing during this period. Within 15 days of the closure of schools in March we were able to very quickly launch ‘Tele School’ which is broadcasting since then which is broadcasting lessons every day for almost 10 hours, starting at 8 am and continues till 6pm. We took an entire channel from Pakistan Television Corporation then we sourced content which is very important and we had it going. In the meantime we started working in others areas, in higher education where on-line learning was encouraged and all the universities went on-line. Of course there were problems where a number of areas were not properly connected with the Internet which forged a real problem. Secondly, our faculty was not very well trained in on-line learning so this also took some time for people to get organized. What I am referring to is the fact that in this COVID emergency, we had a TV channel going, a radio channel going and to get feedback wherever it was possible and I think that there are no universities that were not included. These are some of the quick steps we took to challenge the COVID emergency, then unfortunately when we were able to open the schools in September we had to close them down again in November, however just a few days back we took a decision to gradually open schools in phased manner from the 18th to the 25th of Jan 2021 and by the 1st of next month all education institutions will reopen. But in the meantime we will keep track of how the Corona situation goes on.

While all adversities are a real problem and create difficulties, they also create opportunities, one such opportunity was that it focussed our minds on distance learning. We have put in place projects to develop new content, in fact we are going to be supporting our education technology industry in Pakistan which needed some help, we will be sourcing from them a large number of material that we will be teaching through on-line, through tele-school and through radio, therefore we will have the ability to support different kind of initiatives. These innovations are on-going. We have started a blended learning project in Islamabad which is going to combine different kinds of technologies to determine which one is the appropriate technology and at which age. This is going to be a very important project, the World Bank has come in with huge amount of financing to help us and having seen our performance they also want us to be one of the major countries they are funding to be a model for other countries. In other words while the future is stressful because of COVID, it has created opportunities as we have started ‘distance learning’ and we hope that within the next 6 months we will be able to develop new content and new ways to give to the children. I just wanted to give you a brief snapshot of what we have done during the COVID emergency but there are other fundamental problems that Pakistani education is confronted with, there are 20 million children who are not in schools. We carried out an experiment in Islamabad, identifying about 11000 children out of which we enrolled about 7500 children but then we ran into a brick wall because of poverty and social attitudes, going beyond that was very difficult. The out of school children is a huge challenge, out literacy rate after 73 years is unfortunately very poor as we have different statistics about it; this literacy rate means those people who can only read a little bit and write their names so this is a huge challenge. The literacy rate among women is much higher, enrolment in higher grades out of the total children is only 57% and out of this 32% are females, there are geographic and gender disparities. Then there is a huge problem with ‘learning poverty’ which is something the World Bank came up with, which is actually the amount of learning that a student has to attain over a certain period of time but unfortunately the figures for Pakistan at 75% were very poor. I slightly dispute this figure but what they  meant by this 75% was that a Class 5 student did not have knowledge about the basics after five years of education, in other words they were functionally illiterate despite having gone to school.

There are other problems such as societal problems and we have a huge apartheid-like situation in education where you have the elite schools, then the low fee paying private schools, there is a huge portion of the government schools and then there are the Madrassah schools. Each one is going in their own direction, the elite schools are linked up with the international system such as A level, O level, where the language is usually English and you come to the government schools and the low fee paying private ones the system is Matriculation and the language used is more of less Urdu and their standards are not very high while the madrassas are doing Dars-e-Nizami. We have divided the nation. What does education do, it provides us with a way of looking at the world and if you have different kinds of education you look at the same reality and you come to different conclusions. Some of our serious problems that took place over the last 20-25 years in the shape of terrorism has to do with the perception/divide in the country.

As part of the Tehreek-e-Insaf manifesto we have gone ahead and devised a single national curriculum. In the first phase we have developed for five years, the first primary curriculum is ready and has been adopted by Punjab, KP and Balochistan plus Gilgit, Azad Kashmir and Islamabad of course. Sindh has some reservations. Incidentally let me mention that all the decisions that we took during the COVID emergency and all the decisions that we are taking now, we are taking everybody along. Despite difficulty of the 18th Amendment we have decided to work with everyone and all these decisions were taken unanimously including the one that we took just a few days ago. So the SNC is being unfolded and Insha Allah will start being adopted, there will be legislative cover, by the next academic year which should be in August next year and we hope that all schools and madrassas, English and Urdu, sarkari or non-sarkari, everybody would have the same national curriculum which they will be teaching.

Let me explain the distinction between curriculum and syllabus. Curriculum is student learning object, that what do you expect your students to know, in which class and which time so we want Pakistani children to have the same learning objective so that is what the SNC is about. We are also preparing model textbooks and we have allowed publishers also that all our curriculum that they want to prepare textbooks they will have to have it approved by the Textbook Boards. So we have not excluded textbook writing by private publishers and we are also developing our own textbooks.

In my ministry there are other areas on which we are focussing. Madrassa reform has been a huge effort, we had a number of meetings Ittihad e Tanzeem Madaris and reached an agreement that all madrassa student, and this is unprecedented, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, they have agreed in writing that over the next 4 to 5 year period all madrassa will also be teaching according to the National Curriculum and that their students will be taking part in the national examinations, like Matriculation, FA or FSc. This will allow the madrassa students to look for jobs outside the religious affairs they were confined to. There will be and there is some resistance but we are pushing ahead and are confident we will keep registering madrassas who will give us their bank accounts so we can monitor.

Another grey area which is of great concern to us is ‘skill development’, my Ministry is also charged with the objective of professional training so we have launched a massive programme in which we will, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, creating an accreditation regime in the vocation training sector so that we are able to look at educational institutions in government and private sectors to make sure that they have the right standards required to impart vocational training. So there will be National Accreditation Councils, we are linking up with international companies, also making sure our Vocational Certificates are accepted internationally. We have launched a programme where in the next 18 months we will be training 170000 people in different trades including high end trades like artificial intelligence.

We are also putting efforts into bringing about Examination Reforms and do away with the rote learning or Ratta system. This programme is very much on the anvil and will soon be announced by the Prime Minister with the Federal Board and we hope the Federal Board will become like a role model for the other Boards.

Of great importance to us is the quality of higher education. We have signed an agreement with the British Gateway Exchange and UK education authorities where our teachers will go there and some of them will come here and so on. We will also establish an academy of higher education for training of administrators in education, so that the quality of education improves at the higher level.

Now if there are any questions, I will be happy to answer them.

Q1) Haji Rafiq Pardesi, Member Board of Governors KCFR: As-Salaam-Alaikum, Sir. After hearing all what you have said, I think we are going in a positive direction. As you said the percentage of education is very low in our country but Insha Allah, we can create more and more with our joint efforts. We are here in Karachi and whenever you come here, together we can solve lots of problems, for example, Madrassas. Alhamdolillah more than 400 madrassas and schools are running under me and everybody wants that we teach our students not only Urdu but also English so that they can go anywhere they want without much difficulty. We will be happy to work with you and we want to follow whatever best you are doing for the nation. Thank you.

Cdre (Retd) Sadeed Malik said that the SNC removed the educational apartheid, was like a dream come true for all of us and there are a number of things that are pending here like the 18th Amendment, all education going to the Provinces and then you have said that you will cover it up constitutionally from the Parliament also but there is Article 2213 which says that in the SNC there is lot of stress on religious education, which says particularly that any education not acceptable to others will not be taught to them. So with this aspect in mind, some of the members are thinking that instead of that much large amount of education could it not be possible to add ‘Ethics’ instead of just ‘religious education’. Ethics are part of all religions and the common subject should have been taken out.

A) On the 18th Amendment let me just say that it has devolved a large part of the education agenda to the provinces and I have no issue with that but the Supreme Court also ruled that the Federal Government must fulfill its responsibility of providing education. So in a sense there is overlapping. I have been working very closely with all the education ministers of all the provinces, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan and the result is that we have been able to, despite the 18th Amendment and despite everything,  take almost every decision with consensus. Regarding the SNC and the religious education, before our government came into office, a law was passed by the National Assembly and then adopted by all the provinces, except Sindh, that the Quran Nazra will be taught in the first five years of education. So we followed that law but the difference we made is, after sitting down with the Committee, we emphasized that rather than rote memorizing of Ahadees and Surat, the meaning of it and the concept behind it must also be explained. We have prepared a textbook accordingly with examples, etc given to make children understand the concept. We have not prescribed that schools hire any particular type of teacher. In the curriculum that we have now has religious studies with Islamiat as a subject but there are other subjects also and what is in Islamiat as a subject considered appropriate by the provinces, Sindh is the only one with which we are still negotiating but others have adopted it.

Q2) Air Marshal (Red) Riazuddin Shaikh, Member of Board of Governors KCFR: Thank you very much Sir, for your thoughts and enlightening us on education. I think you have a plan to introduce at one point or the other, vocational training in schools also. At the moment all the provinces have these but unfortunately these institutes are not working like they are supposed to. Do you have any plans to reform these or advise reformation or will it be left to the provinces again because I know that there are about 256 technical institutions at least in Sindh and hardly anyone of them is functioning.  What the Hunar Foundation, a central vocational institute is doing with its few numbers of the institutes that they have, they are probably doing more than the 256 institutes are doing, that is the Model. I do not know how we can adopt this model. I have found that even in the private sector only a handful of institutes that can do that. We need to come up with a plan as a country, obviously it will not be easy, like Germany that has where every industry has to have a certain number of candidates that will be sent by them to the institutes and they actually put up the money to run these institutes. Technical education is very expensive, obviously, so we need somebody to sponsor that and probably the industry can do that. Your views on this, Sir.

A) This is a very comprehensive question so let me try and explain some of the things that we are doing. We believe that after Class 8, different streams should be available to students and we are working on that. One stream is vocational training combined with regular learning, it is called Matritex so we have started experiment of setting these up in different institutions where vocational training can be given but much more thinking needs to go into it so we are really focussing on it. One of the problems of out of school children is that the parents thinks that education does not add to the earning ability of their children. A lot of dropouts are after Class 5, in other words after children reach the age of 10 to 15 these are the largest number of dropouts in out of school children. This happens because of poverty where parents feel that children between 10 and 15 can become an earner but if they realize that there is a certain skill that the child has that can also help to increase earnings then that skill can be useful. I also need to say that far more thinking and effort should go into it but we are very much conscious about it. What we are doing is also very important by creating the National Accreditation Council, an independent body which will be evaluating every vocational institute in the country, whether it is the government sector or the private sector and will be certifying their standards and so on. It will also be giving permission for certain vocational institution to issue certification which will then be counter stamped by the National Accreditation Council. But much needs to be done as the quality is very poor in our vocation technical institutions but this is one way we can ensure quality. The Federal government will not be running these institutions, we will be regulating, we will make sure our certification has value, we will be ensuring quality standards of different types, so a lot of work has been done on the vocation side.

Q3) Mr. Moin Fudda, Member Board of Governors KCFR: Shafqat Sahib I came to you with the High Commissioner of New Zealand and my question may not be too relevant for today’s topic but it is in the long run good for the country. It has to do with the scholars studying abroad for their PhDs. New Zealand has reduced its fee to the national level of US$5000 a year and currently there are 500 students in New Zealand pursuing their PhDs of which 125 are scholars of Higher Education Commission and 375 are doing on their own. Since taking over the PTI has not yet re-launched the scholarship programme for different countries including New Zealand. I think it is important for this inflow to go abroad, some students have come back also. My request to you would be to contact the HEC with the devolution of this power, none of the provinces who have also established their Higher Education Commission are paying attention to sending scholars abroad. Thank you very much Sir.

A) Thank you Moin sahib. Let me give you my viewpoint on this. We have at this time we have approx. 600 PhDs without a job in this country. A number of people sent abroad by HEC never came back so we have to be very careful putting pressure resources into higher education meaning PhDs, etc. For the first time in Pakistan’s history our government has introduced 50000 scholarships for under graduate studies, never has the HEC been given so many scholarships for under graduates. We feel that the under graduate area was neglected so while the scholarship programme for PhDs continues, our focus is now on under graduate studies. We have extended the under graduate programme from two years to four years so now every student who wants to do a BA or BS will be doing four years of course work like in other parts of the world that is our focus. Yes a certain amount of people will be required for Faculty but there are difficulties in managing international scholarship programmes, so I am not going to say that we are not going to do it, we are doing it but our main focus is on under graduate scholarship programme and we have taken it to unprecedented levels.

Q4) Dr. Huma Baqai, Member Board of Governors KCFR: My first question relates to what you said about holding examinations this year. I am your foot soldier, I teach. Just saying holding exams is not enough, exams are a part of a cycle, unless learning and imparting education is ensured, saying that we are going to hold exams is like ticking a box. We at IBA with all the funds that we had, struggled all through this pandemic with teaching and the digital divide that is there in Pakistan. Our students in far flung areas had serious issues and this digital divide is across Pakistan. So I don’t think that Pakistan can actually say, or you as the Federal Minister for Education, that digital solution has overcome the gap, I think that gap continues and it haunts the education during the pandemic. Having said that, just one last comment, I know about the Ehsaas Programme and I know you have done so much and that Imran Khan is committed to vocational education and new institutions, but at the end of the day, the education budget has been reduced, both the higher education budget and otherwise also. If the education budget is reduced and so has the health budget, and the two are related, what is the priority of the government? Thank you Sir.

A) Dr Baqai, let me first speak about the digital divide. When we first started distance learning in a serious way during the pandemic, we obviously realized that there is a serious divide in the country I as Education Minister took the initiative and got all the other ministries i.e. the IT Ministry, the PTA, etc and then we went to the Prime Minister. Now we are launching a major effort through Universal Services Fund (USF) and through other means to ensure that we try and do as much as we can, increase coverage so that this digital divide is reduced as much as possible. It will take time, I am not saying that it will happen in a day. We also have a plan where fibre optics will be provided to every school in the country. But you are right, we must improve internet connectivity of which we are very much aware about.

On the education budget I want to say very quickly that there are certain things that are probably not presented in the way they should be. For example on the development side which means new things in the universities and so on, the maximum amount that was spent before we came in to power was Rs.18 billion, we increased this to 30 billion and we are continuing with that. The problem area has been the non-development budget which is the other expenses, there has been no reduction in this expect the Higher Education Commission wanted Rs.70 billion and we gave them slightly more than Rs.65 billion this year. I am personally very much involved in trying to get more and Insha Allah by the end of the year as other adjustments  take place we will be able to add more, but let me tell you about how these people have been using this money. The staff to faculty in many of these universities is abominable, there is one faculty member against 8 to 9 staff and indiscriminate hiring has been going on without any check. You may be aware that in the west, there may be 25 faculty members with only 3 to 4 staff to look after them, there has been lack of discipline as far as the non-development side of the budget is concerned which we are trying to set right.

Q5) Dr. Azeem Akbar, PhD from Imperial University London: We are in the midst of technological developments which are breathtaking and is transforming the world. What are our plans to be part of those technological developments in terms of research and development and breakthrough technologies? This is very important because if we do not become part of it, nations will be doomed. My second question is about the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals Programme numbering 73 of which education is one which in turn has 11 indicators and targets and we are committed to meet them by 2030 but we never hear anything about the progress. Are we making any progress in that regard? Thank you.

A) On the subject of technology, Dr. Azeem may recall that early on I talked a great deal about technology. I see technology as something allowing us to leap frog many of our traditional barriers, we can reach women through technology especially girls, we can use technology for out of school children, we are doing experiment in Islamabad where are testing out different methodology. There are a number of different technology we are trying to pursue. About the NSGs, one stipulation is to complete 100% literacy by 2030 which I feel will be a tall order and that it will require far more effort. The only ray of light that I see is if we can harness technology for example through projectors you can project a lecture in any screen in any remote village, through technology you can do adult education by giving them tablets so that they can be individually monitored. Similarly tablets can be given to women at homes and literacy can be improved by lessons coming from a distance. A US$200 million World Bank project is on the anvil on which a lot of these experimentations of technology will take place.

Mr. Ikram Sehgal, Chairman KCFR thanked Mr. Shafqat Mahmood for gracing the webinar “which is very interesting and obviously a very important subject and what better in the New Year to discuss something that is really important for Pakistan. I believe that there is a problem with education because of the 18th Amendment. We do not want to go down the way of the Yugoslav model, Yugoslavia had a racial and religious divide and therefore because of devolution we had a violent separation. We have only a racial divide and I think we need to have a Common Minimum Programme and we need to address our problems. We have seen things that are really counter-productive to the continuation of good education, for example, textbooks, the SNC is a good idea and I think you must really work on this after the Senate elections in March to make sure that the 18th Amendment is modified in order to have at least a Common Minimum Programme as far as education is concerned. This is very important”.

Mr. Sehgal then said that the one thing the pandemic taught us is that having mortar and bricks schools is not enough. We can take advantage, we can do double shifts at schools, we can do stage wise alternate on-line classes, etc. It is a very good thing that you are investing in tablets and all that, that technology can expand the reach of education so that no child is actually if left without education. You have said something very nice about public-private partnership and I think we really need to go down that route but the most important thing is the common minimum programme and also the textbook and I think you really need to re-visit your policy about the textbooks because if you give the textbooks down to the provincial level I think you are going to have a problem of the highest order as is already happening  as we see it. So thank you very much Shafqat Sahib for gracing this event and we would like to have you with us again to discuss this important subject. Thank you.