I HAVE been spending some time in the company of education experts from Kenya, Brazil and Pakistan this week. I’ve also had the chance to visit a rural school in Sobral, Brazil and interact with parents, students, teachers, principals and some education administrators of the area. It has brought out for me even more starkly the difference between where we are right now and where we should really be if we are serious about educating our children in Pakistan. Here are some preliminary reflections. I will try to deepen some of these thoughts over the next few articles.

Brazil, a much richer country than Pakistan, spends about six per cent of its GDP on education. This has gone up a lot in recent years. Successive governments, over the last decade and a half, have taken education reforms seriously and these reforms have started to show results as well. Though not all states and municipalities are progressing at the same rate, there are some significant gains in leading states. Education authorities, across the nation, are looking to make sure these gains not only become entrenched, but that the trends continue and progress is achieved throughout the country.

Read: Why bother about education?

Kenya spends 5.1pc of its GDP on education. In its case too, the last few years have seen significant reforms in the education sector. Education outcomes in Kenya, as of now, might not be where the Kenyans want them to be, but the groundwork for many reforms has been done and they are making decent progress.

Pakistan continues to spend only about 2pc of its GDP on education. It has one of the largest populations of out-of-school children in the world. Education quality standards remain quite poor for most of the children who do end up being in school — in what has been termed ‘learning poverty’ in the relevant literature. And we are still dealing with issues of access, dropout, and gender disparity. Moreover, the last few years, even inclusive of the hoopla around the launch and implementation of the Single National Curriculum (SNC), have not seen any large-scale reform efforts from educational authorities in the provinces or at the federal level.

Countries like Brazil offer valuable lessons on how to reform an education system.

Consider the following: the attention that education issues get, the priority accorded to them by governments at all relevant levels, the detailed work on reforms, the focus on implementation and the importance of outcomes in local/national debate. The difference of degree and kind between conversations on the aforementioned areas that I have heard experts from Brazil and Kenya engage in and what I see as the debate on education in Pakistan, is so vast that it almost feels like we are not even on the same planet!

A friend recently said he thought the education debate in Pakistan, at the national and provincial levels, had collapsed around 2018 and has not seen a revival since. According to him, the 2011-2018 period was the heyday for education debate, after which we have not had any really substantive conversations on education issues. Perhaps, he said, learning losses triggered by the pandemic and the closures due to the recent floods might bring education back on the national and provincial agendas. But it is still a ‘might’. It is hard to disagree with the assessment. I am not sure whether even jolts to the system as grave as Covid and the floods will suffice to bring about any change in the situation.

In Brazil, the main responsibility for the delivery of education up to lower secondary, lies with the local municipalities. While the state and federal governments — who look after the higher levels — put in resources, ensure some standardisation, organise procurement at scale and so on, the bulk of the work of managing schools, teachers, school leadership and even resources, is done at the local level.

This creates a closer link between local government and the community, as well as parents. It makes local accountability easier and facilitates a rapid response to changing circumstances. It also creates a sense of competition across the municipalities. The federal and state governments rank municipalities and use the competition aspect purposefully.

But to place the responsibility for education on local government does require stronger local governments. They need to have the capacity and resources to be able to deliver educational services effectively. The federal and state governments have to ensure this.

Municipalities may be rich or poor. While the federal and state governments try to redistribute resources to ensure some level of parity, municipality level differences still exist. Nevertheless, for all its limitations it does seem that stronger local level governments and the decentralisation of the responsibility for education delivery has had a positive impact on the quality of educational services in Brazil.

Pakistan devolved the responsibility for education to the provinces through the 18th Amendment some 12 years ago. But delivery has remained fairly centralised at the provincial level since then. And we do not have (effective) local governments. The secretary education sitting in Lahore, Peshawar or Karachi looks after thousands of schools in the province and hundreds of thousands of teachers as well.

Read: Education — why such neglect?

Punjab alone has some 400,000 plus teachers working in the public sector. Would the local community not have a better handle on issues at the local school? We will have to think through ideas around the devolution of education in the years to come if we want to think of effective and efficient management of some 200,000 plus schools and a million plus teachers.

The education debate in societies who take education issues seriously is at a different level altogether. A few days of interaction with experts from other countries brought this out very clearly for me. Debate on education issues in Pakistan has indeed collapsed. The future for education reforms, particularly the deep and wide-ranging reforms badly needed in the sector, looks bleak.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, and an associate professor of economics at Lums.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2022