early half of school-aged children in Pakistan attend private schools that the government cannot monitor. Some are in large urban institutions, while others are in small, rented schools, but the majority are officially unregistered. Their records are absent from national databases, and their academic progress isn’t tracked. The government’s Education Management Information System (EMIS) focuses on public school students but doesn’t include the millions in private schools. Consequently, roughly 47 percent of students remain unseen by the education system meant to serve them.

This invisibility goes beyond bureaucratic issues; it’s a national blind spot. With no reliable data on enrollment or student achievement, Pakistan struggles to understand what nearly half of its students are learning or whether they are learning at all. Official statistics, reports, and reforms that rely only on public school data provide an incomplete view. The remaining part of the education system functions without oversight, evaluation, or acknowledgment. This hidden segment constitutes the unseen half of Pakistan’s educational landscape.

Even though international and national human capital indicators typically rely on official data from recognized public and private institutions, excluding unregistered private schools leads to a substantial underestimation of key metrics such as gross and net enrollment rates, expected years of schooling, and average attainment. This results in a misleading perception of low educational engagement, hiding the fact that millions of children are attending schools but are not reflected in official statistics.

This data gap reveals a core issue that hampers Pakistan’s ability to properly assess, regulate, and enhance its education system. While the government’s monitoring systems, such as the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS) and the Pakistan Institute of Education (PIE), primarily focus on public schools by collecting data on registrations, teacher........

© The News on Sunday