A Crisis Years in the Making

Across Punjab’s nine boards, more than 750,000 Class 9 students failed their exams in 2026, a pass rate of just 45.98 percent. In Lahore, the province’s flagship board, more than half of all ninth graders failed. In Peshawar, the picture was worse still, with nearly six in ten ninth graders left unsuccessful. These numbers are not simply about one bad exam season. They are the clearest evidence yet of a crisis that began long before 2026 and long before COVID-19 ever closed a classroom door. Pakistan’s classrooms were already struggling. Millions of children were not enrolled at all, and even those who attended often left without basic reading or math skills. COVID-19 did not create this crisis. It exposed one that already existed and made it impossible to look away from.

The System Was Already Failing

Pakistan entered the pandemic with a system that was already struggling to serve its children fairly. The ASER study, conducted by Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi with UNICEF support, had long shown that a large share of children between five and sixteen were not attending school at all and that many of those who were enrolled could not read simple sentences or solve basic sums. Rich and poor households, cities and villages, boys and girls, and government and private schools all experienced education very differently. COVID did not invent these gaps. It simply made them far harder to ignore.

What the Numbers Show

This is where the evidence becomes hard to argue with. The learning loss report, also from ASER, found that school closures directly affected close to forty million learners across the country, from the earliest years of school through to college. The share of children able to read a simple Urdu story had been rising steadily before the pandemic, climbing from fifteen percent in 2015 to twenty-four percent in 2019, but it fell back to twenty-two percent by 2021. A similar pattern appeared in basic math. Pakistan did not simply lose a school year. It lost ground that had taken years to build.

During the lockdown, many parents........

© Paradigm Shift