F for education

Last week, all nine Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISEs) in Punjab released Class 9 results.

This year’s headline numbers are a provincial pass rate of 46 per cent – most students failed Class 9. Failure at a grade level is defined as failing in one (or more) subject by scoring less than 33 per cent (an abysmally low bar) in an exam or practical.

Broken down by gender, the pass rates for girls and boys this year are reported at around 58 and 35 per cent, respectively. By public and private schools, pass rates in Lahore BISE, the largest in Punjab, are 39 and 70 per cent, respectively. Similarly, for Faisalabad BISE, the pass rate breaks 45 and 73 per cent for public and private schools, respectively. Across almost all districts of Punjab, private schools have outperformed public schools by margins of 24-32 per cent.

Save for Rawalpindi and Bahawalpur, where the pass rate fell by 8.0 and 6.0 per cent year-over-year, respectively, it held just about steady everywhere else.

Thus, the great tragedy of the Class 9 results is not that of a widespread sharp decline. The tragedy is that after all the proclamations of education reforms of the last few years – the Single National Curriculum or SNC, later deftly rebranded as the National Curriculum of Pakistan or NCP, the Daanish Schools being established at an unsustainable per-student cost, the public-private partnership programme for public schools – nothing has budged, nothing has changed. Last year’s Class 9 pass rate in Punjab was 48 per cent, virtually indistinguishable from this year’s 46 per cent.

According to the Annual School Census (2024-25) of public schools in Punjab (not including private schools following the public school curriculum), the attrition rates in enrollment numbers going from Class 8 to Class 10 are brutal: around a 12.5 per cent drop out between Class 8 and Class 9, and another 20 per cent of Class 9 students do not make it to Class 10. Most shocking of all, 89 per cent of Class 10 / Matric public school students do not make it to Class 11.

I am citing the figures for Punjab (because they are handy), but the situation is just as bad in other provinces. I write about the state of education in this country often, and I have run out of euphemisms for shame and failure.

Before I get to some of the explanations being offered for this year’s disappointing results, let me underline a lesson for our ministers that can be drawn from this long-running disappointment: Please, do not make too much noise and draw attention to yourself and your portfolio if you are not serious about putting in the effort and are just out to raise your social media profile. Publicity stunts and grand proclamations get you in the headlines but, inevitably, some people start watching your work to make sure you follow through, and that usually ends in a pants-on-fire situation.

And so it is this time as well. Early reactions to the release of Class 9 results were congratulatory messages to select (read: cherry-picked) schools that had performed well. Then, as public reaction to the poor statistics started pouring out, the honourable minister of education attached a threatening message to those congratulatory messages: Teachers and administrators of schools that performed poorly ‘will be taken to task’.

A little later still, a new spin on things: The low pass / high fail rate was actually a good thing – it was a result of a crackdown on the cheating mafia. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. Indeed, if that was true, maybe the Punjab Education Department ought to offer its consultancy services to Cambridge International Education, which has been struggling to maintain the secrecy of its exams for years, and show’em how it’s done!

Another explanation offered for this year’s poor showing is that the exams included a few word problems that required students to apply the concepts they learned, and that is what tripped many up. I reviewed a few Class 9 Mathematics exams for two large exam boards in Punjab. Calling any of those questions an ‘applied word problem’ is stretching the meaning of these words.

The approach of governments – all our governments of the last few decades, at least – to education is fundamentally flawed. If the constitution does not get its arm twisted, the next general elections should be held around early 2029, about 36 months from now. This means that if you speak to any government department today, it will not be interested in any project or solution that can be completed and taken credit for after more than 24 months.

Long-term planning and execution do not exist. That is fine if the task is building a road or other infrastructure, but it does not work in the education sector. You can build a school building in a year, but that is only the first step in being able to offer an education to out-of-school children, a number that equals the number of children in schools. To make any good come from it, you need students to go through at least 12 years of schooling, probably another four years of university, and then another four or five years of entry-level work experience – 20 years in total – before you can see early signs of positive societal changes, rise in productivity. No one is willing to wait that long.

The writer (she/her) has a PhD in Education.