Parts I and II of this analysis examined what Pakistan's official education data reveal about access, gender gaps, and the structural failures of the public school system. This final part turns to a question the reports raise but do not fully answer: beyond the 47.1 million children enrolled in government schools, who is educating the rest, and what kind of education are they receiving?

The Pakistan Education Statistics Report 2023–24 records total national enrollment across all sectors at 58.3 million students. The difference — approximately 11.2 million children is distributed across a constellation of parallel systems that together constitute a shadow education architecture, largely invisible in public policy debates but educating nearly one in five Pakistani students.

For the first time, the report's Data Standardisation Framework allows a reasonably complete picture of non-public enrollment. The breakdown is illuminating and in several respects, surprising.

The Public-Private Transfer the State Doesn't Acknowledge

Enrollment in Non-Public Educational Institutions (2023–24)

The largest single category is not Madaris, as many assume, but Education Foundations — provincial subsidy programmes that support 3.47 million students in low-cost private schools. This figure exceeds Madaris enrollment and represents something the government rarely acknowledges: it is paying private providers to educate children that its own schools cannot adequately serve.

The Education Foundations are not a complement to the public system. They are, in significant part, a publicly funded admission of its inadequacy. The institutional footprint reinforces this shift. Pakistan has 148,216 public schools, while all other institutions combined total 144,021 — almost the same number. Yet public schools enrol four times as many students. The average public school serves over 300 students, while the average non-public institution serves fewer than 80.

As the performance of public schools continues to decline, this imbalance raises a critical question: are these figures reflecting differences in reporting and enrolment practices, or are public schools simply overwhelmed by student loads several times larger than those faced by most non-public institutions?

Raising education spending toward the Sustainable Development Goal 4 benchmark of 4–6% of Gross Domestic Product will not be sufficient on its own. Nearly 90% of the existing education budget is already consumed by salaries

Raising education spending toward the Sustainable Development Goal 4 benchmark of 4–6% of Gross Domestic Product will not be sufficient on its own. Nearly 90% of the existing education budget is already consumed by salaries

Government performance, however, continues to be measured largely against students who remain within the public system, while those absorbed into parallel institutions fall outside its analytical frame. Fragmentation at this scale is not merely administrative. It is the institutional footprint of an unacknowledged policy failure. Of all the findings in this three-part analysis, the gender distribution within Madaris is perhaps the most unexpected.

Gender Distribution in Deeni Madaris by Province (2023–24)

Note: Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan totals in source data appear inconsistent with gender subtotals — corrected figures shown.

Nationally, girls enrolled in Madaris — 1.82 million — outnumber boys, constituting 55.9% of total Madrassa enrollment. In Punjab, girls account for 58.5% of Madrassa students. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province with one of the widest literacy gender gaps, girls represent 67.2% of enrollment, outnumbering boys by more than two to one.

This does not mean Madaris are centres of female empowerment. It means that in areas where formal schools are distant, understaffed, or socially unacceptable, a gender-segregated religious institution becomes the only educational option families consider acceptable for their daughters. Access, in such cases, is achieved at the cost of the curriculum.

The policy implications are significant. These 1.82 million girls are not counted as out of school. By one definition, they are educated. By another, they remain educationally invisible. Many will eventually contribute to the invisible female population gap identified in Part I, passing through an educational institution but emerging without the functional literacy the system records as success.

The distribution of tertiary institutions reinforces patterns already visible at lower levels.

Number of Universities and Colleges by Province (2022–23)

Universities/District Institutes data from 2022–23, carried forward as the Higher Education Commission did not supply 2023–24 figures.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa data consolidation into the "Degree Colleges" category explains zero entry for Inter Colleges.

Punjab alone accounts for 56% of all universities and colleges nationally.

By contrast, Balochistan — Pakistan’s largest province and its most educationally deprived — has just 150 tertiary institutions, representing 3% of the national total and fewer than the much smaller territory of Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

Sindh's 538 tertiary institutions are strikingly disproportionate for the country's second most populous province, and the disparity is compounded by geography. The overwhelming majority are concentrated in Karachi, leaving interior Sindh with negligible higher education access. The contrast with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is instructive: a province with a smaller population has 743 institutions compared to Sindh's 538.

A student who overcomes every barrier to complete secondary school in rural Balochistan or interior Sindh then confronts a higher education landscape that was never adequately built for them. The pipeline that the system struggled to fill at the primary level runs dry long before it reaches the university gate.

The geographic concentration of tertiary institutions reveals a deeper structural imbalance. Some 4,468 institutions — 90% of the national total — are located in Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and Islamabad. The remaining 717, just 10%, serve Sindh, Balochistan, and Gilgit-Baltistan combined.

It is a geographic fracture line as well as a regional disparity that concentrates higher education opportunity in the north while leaving the south and west, home to some of the country's most deprived populations, effectively underserved. That this imbalance has persisted without systematic policy correction demands urgent attention.

Another 1.21 million students are enrolled in Non-Formal Basic Education (NFE) centres. These programmes aim to reach children, disproportionately girls, who have never enrolled in formal school or have dropped out.

Yet an NFE centre may offer instruction that falls well short of even the limited standard of a single-teacher government primary school. Combined, Madaris and NFE centres educate 4.47 million students.

This raises an uncomfortable possibility: much of Pakistan’s apparent progress in reducing out-of-school numbers may reflect children being absorbed into alternative systems, rather than genuine expansion of quality formal education. Progress measured by enrolment headcounts will almost always appear more impressive than progress measured by learning outcomes.

Taken together, the data reveal a system that has made genuine progress in some areas while obscuring failures in others. Girls’ primary completion rates have risen. Girls outperform boys in language assessments. Women are approaching parity in higher education. These are real achievements, and they deserve recognition.

But 25.1 million children remain out of school, the revised figure from the detailed tables, lower than the 26.2 million cited at the report’s launch. 1.82 million girls are enrolled in Madaris, counted as educated, invisible to the formal economy.

And the state has quietly transferred responsibility for nearly one in five students to foundations, Madaris, and non-formal centres whose outcomes it does not systematically measure.

But the most frequently cited solution, raising education spending toward the Sustainable Development Goal 4 benchmark of 4–6% of Gross Domestic Product, will not be sufficient on its own. Nearly 90% of the existing education budget is already consumed by salaries.

Without structural reform in how resources are allocated, additional funding risks expanding the system’s costs without improving its outcomes. More money is necessary. But without systemic reform, it will not be enough.

The new Data Standardisation Framework allows Pakistan, for the first time, to see the full shape of its education landscape. But seeing is not solving. A country that carefully counts its children but inadequately educates them has not solved its education crisis. It has merely documented it.

The remaining question, for policymakers, for citizens, and for the 25.1 million children still waiting, is whether documentation will finally lead to action. Effective support must begin with a clearer understanding of how the country’s fragmented education landscape actually functions.

© The Friday Times