Last week, this column discussed the federal spending on education and how it seems to be dead in the water, with the centre absolving itself of any responsibility (Read: "Education budget (1): Avoiding responsibility," Published June 09, 2016). The PML-N's promised 'four percent of GDP' seems to be a fantasy at this point, and we'll just leave it at that. Today's article will focus on the break-up of the federal education budget (A disclaimer: although the discussion is on the federal budget, data for federal schools is unavailable separately. The following data pertains to all public schools in Pakistan, both federal and provincial).
As the chart indicates, the major chunk of the state's spending goes to the tertiary sector - primary education starts from early-childhood centres (KG/Montessori) and goes up to fifth grade; secondary starts from sixth and goes up to grade 12 (also includes higher secondary schools and colleges); and the tertiary section starts from grade 13 onward (all universities).
The federal government's primary/secondary education budget spending is only for those schools under its jurisdiction - i.e. Islamabad, FATA, GB, and AJK. The allocation for the tertiary sector, however, is for all universities across the country. This explains the skewed division.
Public educational institutions account for around two-thirds of all in Pakistan, and the data shows that there is indeed a clear lack of universities in Pakistan. But that being said, there is an urgent need for increasing spending on secondary schools as well. Over 80 percent of public schools are primary schools, with secondary institutions making up the remainder. Simply put, for every four primary schools that go up to grade five, there is only one secondary school that will take a student up till grade 12.
As a result, there are a large number of out-of-school children that graduated primary but never entered into secondary school. This is a problem that needs rectification; as of right now, there are over 24 million out-of-school children in Pakistan, around 18 million of which are those who graduated primary but never entered into secondary education.
Furthermore, the division in terms of current and development expenditure is not all that encouraging. The current expenditure takes care of the salary and the operating expenses of schools; hence this slice is always bigger. The development budget (as the name indicates), on the other hand, is for the purpose of development; setting up new schools, upgrading infrastructure, new facilities, etc. And for the coming year, the development budget is 25 percent less than the revised spending in FY16.
Around 50 percent of all public schools in Pakistan are missing one or more of the following facilities: toilets, boundary walls, running electricity, drinking water. The spending for these is supposed to come from the development budget! So, the development budget needs to be enhanced not just to establish new schools, but to at least bring the existing ones up to a feasible standard.
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