The Public School System in Sindh: Empirical Insights

Abstract

This paper presents descriptive statistics on the government school education system in Sindh. The data are obtained from the latest administrative annual school census in Sindh (2011/12). The province’s schooling system comprises 48,932 schools of which 47,000 are primary, middle, and elementary schools, giving Sindh one of the densest public schooling systems in the world with almost 1.8 schools for every 1,000 people in rural Sindh. The functional schooling capacity, however, is low, with less than 15 percent of these schools having at least two teachers and access to basic facilities such as toilets, drinking water, electricity, and boundary walls. Against this backdrop, we examine key trends in education outcomes using the Pakistan Living Standards and Measurement surveys for 2004/05 and 2010/11. We find that the net enrollment rates (NERs) at primary, middle, and secondary level in Sindh stagnated, at best, during 2007–11 after a sharp increase registered in 2006; this trend is similar to that of the rest of Pakistan. Gains in NER vary significantly across districts with some performing exceptionally better than others. Finally, we cross-validate these statistics using independent household- and school-level census data on 300 communities, collected as part of an ongoing impact evaluation study in three districts of rural Sindh.