Sindh’s Battle to Bring Every Child to School

By Irfan Ali

The most consequential asset of any province lies neither in its transport systems nor in the natural resources buried beneath its soil. It lies in the intellectual and productive potential of its people. Roads, bridges and public infrastructure may facilitate development, but it is an educated population that sustains it.
For Sindh, therefore, the struggle to bring every child into the classroom is not merely an educational undertaking; it is a defining social and economic imperative.

For years, the province’s education system has remained under intense public and media scrutiny. Dilapidated school buildings, a large out-of-school population, shortages of teachers, weak attendance mechanisms and the enduring controversy surrounding ghost employees have shaped much of the public discourse. These concerns are legitimate and cannot be dismissed.
Yet they constitute only one side of a far more complex picture.

Any balanced assessment must also take into account the extraordinary pressures under which Sindh’s education system has operated. Between 2010 and 2022, the province endured successive climate-related disasters that damaged educational infrastructure on an unprecedented scale.

International and government-supported assessments indicate that more than 25,000 schools were partially or completely damaged during the catastrophic floods of 2010 and 2022. Approximately 5,655 educational institutions were affected in 2010, while the floods of 2022 damaged an estimated 19,808 schools.

The consequences extended well beyond the destruction of buildings. Schools were converted into temporary shelters, access routes were washed away, communities were displaced and household incomes collapsed. For thousands of children, particularly those living in rural and flood-prone districts, the disaster widened the distance between home and classroom.
Poverty, displacement and child labour compounded the risk of permanent educational exclusion, while girls faced the additional barriers of restricted mobility, safety concerns and the absence of nearby post-primary institutions.

It is against this difficult backdrop that Sindh’s emerging education reforms must be understood.
The province has not overcome its educational crisis, nor can decades of structural neglect be reversed within a single political or budgetary cycle. Nevertheless, a discernible change is taking place in the direction of policy. The emphasis is gradually shifting from fragmented interventions towards a broader framework encompassing school financing, teacher availability, institutional expansion, verified enrolment and digital accountability.

One of the most notable developments has been the introduction of the School-Specific Budget, a decentralised financing mechanism intended to place limited but meaningful decision-making authority closer to the classroom. Under the initiative, school heads have been granted greater financial autonomy to address institution-specific needs rather than waiting for every minor repair or purchase to pass through layers of centralised administration.

The programme was allocated Rs18.67 billion in the 2025–26 financial year. This was increased to Rs22.64 billion for 2026–27, reflecting a rise of approximately 21 per cent. The allocation for school furniture and fixtures was also raised substantially, from Rs3.81 billion to Rs7.62 billion.

The significance of this reform lies not merely in the size of the allocation, but in the principle behind it. Schools do not face identical problems. An institution in a flood-affected village may urgently require roof repairs and drinking-water facilities, while an overcrowded urban school may need additional furniture, classrooms or sanitation arrangements. By allowing school administrations to respond to their own priorities, the School-Specific Budget introduces a degree of flexibility that has long been absent from public-school management.

Across the province, the initiative has enabled schools to undertake essential repairs, restore classrooms, improve sanitation, purchase furniture and create safer and more welcoming learning environments. Such improvements may appear modest when viewed individually, but collectively they can strengthen parental confidence in public schools and help restore dignity to the learning experience.

The battle against educational exclusion, however, cannot be won through infrastructure alone. Recognising the multiple social and economic factors that keep children outside school, the Sindh government, in collaboration with Unicef, has developed a five-year Multi-Sectoral Roadmap for Out-of-School Children and Adolescents. Covering the period from July 2025 to June 2030, the roadmap seeks to reduce the province’s out-of-school population by 50 per cent.

Its multi-sectoral character is particularly significant. A child may remain outside school because of poverty, disability, child labour, the absence of identity documentation, inadequate transport or restrictive social norms. These barriers cannot be removed by the Education Department acting in isolation. They demand coordination across social protection, health, local government, civil registration and community-level institutions.

The roadmap therefore represents an important conceptual shift. It treats educational exclusion not simply as a matter of insufficient enrolment, but as a broader social challenge requiring sustained and coordinated intervention. In doing so, it places the out-of-school child—not the administrative department—at the centre of policy.

Teacher availability has been another persistent weakness of the public education system. A school without teachers may exist on official records, but it cannot function as an institution of learning. Sindh has sought to narrow this gap through one of the largest merit-based recruitment exercises undertaken in its education sector.

Nearly 97,000 Primary School Teachers and Junior Elementary School Teachers were recruited through tests administered by Sukkur IBA University. The use of an independent testing service helped establish a more transparent route into public employment and strengthened the principle of merit in a sector historically vulnerable to political influence.

The scale of the recruitment is important not only in numerical terms. Thousands of schools that had been operating with inadequate staff received additional teachers, while previously non-functional institutions gained the human resources required to reopen. The process also included women, persons with disabilities and members of minority communities, lending the recruitment exercise a wider dimension of social inclusion.

The growing presence of female teachers is particularly consequential for rural and conservative communities. In many such areas, parents are more willing to enrol and retain their daughters when women teachers are available. Teacher recruitment, therefore, is not merely an employment measure; it is also a means of improving access, attendance and public confidence.

The province has more recently expanded its focus towards specialised teaching categories. In July 2026, the government approved the recruitment process for 584 women who obtained 55 marks or above in the Early Childhood Teacher test conducted through Sukkur IBA, subject to the verification of their academic credentials and other required documents.

Early childhood education is often treated as a peripheral component of the school system, despite its decisive influence on language development, social interaction and readiness for formal learning. The induction of trained Early Childhood Teachers can provide younger children with a stronger educational foundation and reduce the likelihood of early disengagement from school.

A parallel decision was taken in relation to Junior Science Teachers. More than 8,000 candidates who secured at least 55 marks in the independently administered test were approved for appointment against available positions. This recruitment carries particular importance for a public-school system in which science and mathematics have frequently been taught by generalist teachers without adequate subject specialisation.

The presence of qualified science teachers can help move classroom instruction beyond rote memorisation and towards inquiry, experimentation and conceptual understanding. It may also widen the academic horizons of students in districts where access to specialised teaching has traditionally remained limited.

Another reform with direct implications for educational continuity is the planned upgrading of 10,000 primary schools to the elementary level. One of the least acknowledged causes of dropout in rural Sindh is the absence of a nearby school offering education beyond Grade Five.

For many children, the end of primary education becomes the end of formal education itself. The nearest middle or elementary school may be several kilometres away, making daily travel costly, unsafe or socially unacceptable. Girls are particularly vulnerable at this stage, as concerns regarding distance, mobility and security frequently lead families to discontinue their education.

Upgrading existing primary schools offers a practical response to this transition gap. It would allow children to continue their studies within their own communities, reduce travel-related barriers and improve progression from the primary to the lower-secondary level. In this respect, the policy is not simply about changing the administrative category of schools; it is about preventing the educational journey of thousands of children from ending prematurely.

Alongside investment in infrastructure and human resources, Sindh is also attempting to strengthen education governance through digital systems. Under the province’s new enrolment framework, student records are to be linked with verified NADRA B-Form numbers.

This measure can help establish a more accurate and credible database by reducing duplicate, incomplete or incorrect enrolment entries. It can also allow students to be tracked as they progress from one grade or institution to another. In a system serving millions of children, reliable data is not merely an administrative convenience; it is the foundation of sound educational planning.

Accurate enrolment figures can improve decisions regarding the distribution of teachers, textbooks, furniture, classrooms and financial resources. They can also enable the government to distinguish between children who were never enrolled and those who entered school but later dropped out.

The Student Attendance Monitoring and Redress System, commonly known as SAMRS, extends this digital approach to daily student attendance. The system has been designed to record attendance, identify recurring absenteeism and flag children who may be at risk of leaving school.

Its mobile application can operate offline and synchronise information when internet connectivity becomes available, making it suitable for use in remote areas where digital infrastructure remains uneven. More importantly, SAMRS seeks to transform attendance data into an early-warning mechanism. A child who begins to miss school repeatedly can be identified before temporary absence turns into permanent dropout.

The inclusion of the word “redress” in the system’s title is significant. It suggests that the objective is not limited to recording absence, but extends to understanding and addressing its causes through engagement with families, schools and local communities.

For teachers and other education employees, the province has developed the Facial Recognition Attendance Management and Evaluation System, or FRAMES. Through facial recognition, geofencing and digital attendance records, the system is intended to verify the presence of employees at their assigned institutions.

The initiative represents an effort to replace unreliable manual reporting with real-time administrative oversight. It has the potential to improve staff attendance, strengthen institutional discipline and address the politically sensitive issue of ghost employees. It also provides education authorities with a clearer picture of staff availability across thousands of schools, including those located far from district headquarters.

Taken together, these reforms point towards an education policy that is becoming more closely aligned with the actual causes of exclusion. School-level financing addresses neglected infrastructure. Large-scale recruitment tackles teacher shortages. Specialised appointments strengthen early childhood and science education. School upgrading responds to dropout after Grade Five, while verified enrolment and digital attendance systems improve the state’s capacity to identify and retain students.

No single initiative, however ambitious, can transform an education system overnight. Sindh’s challenge is rooted in decades of inequality, weak institutional capacity, recurring natural disasters and uneven access between urban and rural communities. The significance of the present reform agenda lies not in claiming that these problems have disappeared, but in demonstrating that they are being confronted through a broader and increasingly coherent policy framework.

The province’s educational journey remains unfinished, but it is no longer static. Schools are receiving greater financial authority, tens of thousands of teachers have entered the system through independent testing, pathways beyond primary education are being expanded and digital tools are being deployed to improve both attendance and accountability.

These developments deserve to be judged by their collective direction. They suggest an emerging understanding that educational exclusion begins long before a child formally drops out. It begins when a classroom is unsafe, when no teacher is available, when the next school is too far away, when attendance goes unnoticed and when official records fail to reflect the child’s existence.

Sindh’s new battle, therefore, is not simply to increase enrolment figures. It is to create a public education system capable of finding every excluded child, bringing that child into the classroom and providing sufficient reason to remain there.

That is an undertaking requiring patience, continuity and institutional resolve. But it is also one that carries consequences far beyond the education sector. A child brought into school today is not merely another enrolment entry; that child represents the future social, economic and democratic strength of the province.

The ultimate measure of Sindh’s progress will be found not in official announcements, but in the gradual disappearance of the distance between the child and the classroom. The reforms now under way indicate that the province has begun to recognise that distance—and is increasingly determined to close it.

(The writer is engineer and a residence of district Dadu, Sindh)