News Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The trend of unregistered schools in Pakistan is very common as 18 per cent of primary and 14 per cent of lower secondary and 4 per cent of higher secondary are being functioned without having regulation or registration from the concerned government bodies, said a report release.
The report titled ‘Global Education Monitoring Report 2022, non-state actors in education, who chooses who loses’ was conducted by Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA) in joint collaboration with United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The report revealed a rapid proliferation of private education institutions requires stronger oversight to ensure that quality and equity are not put at risk.
The report stated that out of 5,000 total schools in Rawalpindi two-thirds of private schools have no registration, adding that 2016-17 Private School Census, some 54,000 private schools offered pre-primary education in Punjab province under various categorizations, such as pre-nursery, nursery, and prep.
The majority of programmes operated as unregulated entities, without government supervision and oversight. It recalled that less than 3 per cent of the annual GDP is being spent on education in the last 12 years. Due to this backdrop, the report added, public sector schools are insufficient in both supply and quality. “Private education has grown to fill the gaps. One-third of students in Pakistan attend privately funded schools with 45 per cent of those in private education and 25 per cent in state education in urban areas paying for additional private tutoring,” adding that overall 8 percent of students are enrolled in religious schools.
The report highlights the exponential growth of private tutoring and educational technology companies in the country, predominantly due to rapid growth in the labour market and the resultant competitiveness in the education system.
