LAHORE: Twenty-five million children in this Pakistan don’t go to school. Not this year. Not last year. For decades.
A new policy review from the Civil Services Academy (CSA) puts a number on what teachers, parents and district officials have said for years: Pakistan’s out-of-school crisis didn’t happen overnight, and no single policy fixed it because no single policy caused it, Focus Pakistan learnt.
Two years have passed since the federal government declared a national education emergency. Enrollment numbers haven’t moved much. The CSA report blames four things working together thin funding, a governance system split across too many hands, weak institutional follow-through, and provinces that simply don’t have equal capacity to fix their own schools.
These five groups of policy analysis carried out their analysis in relation to the education policies for all provinces and territories in Pakistan, including Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Islamabad Capital Territory, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir. They rated them in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, equity, ethics, and realism of these policies.
Out-of-School Children in Pakistan
Every province has a roadmap. That’s not the issue, researchers found. Sources confirmed to Focus Pakistan that the National Education Action Plan (NEAP) 2026 looks solid on paper in most provinces the failure sits entirely in execution.
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To put things into context, the total figure ranges between 25.1 million and 26 million kids who are not attending school in Pakistan. Free and mandatory education for all children is provided for in article 25-A of the constitution. It’s worth noting that Pakistan continues to have the world’s second-largest out-of-school population.
Moving back into the 1990s, one finds the same scenario. AEPAM monitored out-of-school figures in the decades up until the 2010s; however, government schools were never constructed at a quick enough pace to match population growth. Families turned to cheap private schools instead, and that shadow system kept expanding while public education stagnated.
Pakistan Education Emergency
May 8, 2024, the day the emergency was declared brought political attention Pakistan’s education sector rarely gets. But attention isn’t the same as a fix, the report argues, because each province is fighting a different war. Sindh loses children after primary school and takes regular hits from floods and climate disasters. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa deals with insurgency, punishing terrain, and too few female teachers willing or able to reach remote districts. Balochistan has schools that technically exist buildings, staff lists, budgets — but many simply don’t function, spread across some of the country’s most sparsely populated terrain. Islamabad and the federal territories post better enrollment on paper, yet hide sharp gaps once you look district by district.
Punjab shoulders the greatest burden of all, with 9.6 million to 10.4 million children out of school, as per the report. Disaggregate this figure using the 2026 baseline statistics provided by the Punjab School Education Department itself, and we find there are two different issues here. One is that 6.4 million children have never entered the classroom. Another 3.16 million started school and left before finishing.
That split matters. Getting a child enrolled and keeping a child enrolled are two different fights, and Pakistan is currently losing both.
