ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan approved the basic framework of a new National Education Policy on Friday, the Joint Adviser to the Ministry of Education and Professional Training Muhammad Rafique Tahir confirmed on Saturday to Arab News.
The ministry is still working on the policy and keeping details under wraps. Officials declined to comment on the highlights of the framework presented to the PM, but said the full policy would formally be announced on November 26, after Khan’s approval.
Tahir told Arab News that the current education policy, formulated in 2009, was outdated. The only important aspect of the upcoming policy that he revealed related to Article 25-A of the Constitution, which obliges the state to provide free, compulsory, quality education to children aged between five and 16, saying that the government wanted to take that provision more seriously.
Describing Pakistan’s education system as “fragmented and apartheid,” the prime minister decreed earlier this week that major changes would be made to state-run education in the country by implementing a blanket National Education Policy.
In his maiden speech after his election victory, Khan pledged to serve the cause of education in Pakistan by improving public education.
Identifying the challenges inherent in that exercise, Federal Minister of Education and Professional Training Shafqat Mahmood cited “out-of-school children, education apartheid, quality of education and skill-development issues,” in a statement.
Mahmood said the new education policy would ensure that all children received a “fair and equal opportunity to receive a high quality of education in order to achieve their full potential.”
The statement said that this required “optimum utilization of the existing infrastructure, the employment of technology solutions, improvement in non-formal education systems, quality teachers and that education be incentivized.”
UNICEF official Ellen Van Kalmthout told Arab News, “The new government’s (focus) on bringing all children to school — including through investment in accelerated learning programs for the large group of children and adolescents who have never gone to school — is critically important.
“A key challenge in Pakistan is the high number of children out of school — 22.8 million according to the latest government data — of whom the majority have never gone to school,” she continued. “Equity is a major concern. Girls, poor children, and children in rural areas are most likely to be out of school or to dropout, or fail to continue to middle or secondary school or connect with employment.
“Another challenge is that learning levels are low. Government assessment data on learning shows that the national average scores of grade 4 and grade 8 students do not meet acceptable achievement levels in core subjects,” Kalmthout added.
But that situation “appears worse,” wrote “educationist” Shahid Siddiqui in his recent op-ed in The News International, “if we consider the fact that 35 percent of schoolchildren drop out before they reach the eighth grade.” He contended that Pakistan had “one of the highest school dropout rates in the world.”
The standards of government education in Pakistan have long been unsatisfactory, so some parents have chosen to enroll their children in often prohibitively expensive private schools —  something the vast majority of Pakistanis simply cannot afford, making it even more pressing that the government take appropriate measures to address the situation.
Pakistan’s urban areas have a much higher literacy rate (74 percent) compared to 49 percent in rural territories, according to the latest Economic Survey of Pakistan. And that gap continues to widen. The country’s overall literacy rate is 58 percent —  down two percent from the fiscal year 2015-2016.
Siddiqui argued that the country’s failure to provide all children with adequate education has led to an increase in “frustration and extremism” in Pakistan. 
The prime minister has publicly promised to offer solutions to these problems, and the new education policy will indicate just how well he has managed to do so.
“The global benchmark for spending on education is four percent of GDP (gross domestic product),” said UNICEF’s Van Kalmthout, adding that Pakistan is well below that target, spending an estimated 2.6 percent of GDP on education.