Education woes: Education ministry body launches misleading report

Graphs, pie charts have been taken from previous report

ISLAMABAD: H G Wells once said that statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. And statistics may be one of the effective and efficient means for communicating information.

However, the Pakistan Education Statistics Report 2012-13, shows a different picture.

The report released by the National Education Management Information System at the Academy of Education, Planning and Management on Friday, is full of slips, oversight and blunders as most of the figures, graphs and pie charts have been copy-pasted from 2011-12 report.



Minister of State for Federal Education and Professional Training Balighur Rehman admitting the blunder directed the officials to ensure timely preparation of annual reports related to educational statistics to make them useful for policymakers.

For instance, according to the 2012-13 report, the total number of out of school children at the primary level is 6.7 million in the country. Of them, 3.2 million are in Punjab, 2.1 million in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, 1.8 million in Sindh and 0.54 million in Balochistan. The same figures have been mentioned in the 2011-12 report while collecting province-wise data except for the total figure of 8.3 million for out of school children across the country.

Similarly, the number of universities, 139, is the same in both old and new reports, while the actual number of universities has crossed 145 figures.

The graphs have also been manipulated to compile the desired results and most bar and pie charts have completely been copied from the previous report.

Besides, in some bar charts the colours are misleading and more than half of the book has no numbering which makes it difficult to leaf through it.

The minister said that inter-provincial ministers’ forum will meet on January 30 to seek inputs regarding National Curriculum Council to devise a minimum education standard for schools and colleges.

NEMIS incharge Nasir Amin said that there may be some minor mistakes in the report but they had taken the actual raw data from the database.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 10^th, 2015.