Pindi schools have best teacher-student ratio in Punjab

Pakpattan has the worst ratio, while Rahim Yar Khan has the most schools

RAWALPINDI: Government schools in Rawalpindi have the best teacher-student ratios in the entire province, shows the latest data released by the Punjab government on Monday.

It adds to the top-ten provincial rank for the district in education (Alif AIlaan District Education Rankings for 2017), even if it may have been lacking in some of learning and retention abilities, particularly in its rural areas.

According to data from the Punjab education department’s student information system (SIS), of the 48,175 government-run schools in Punjab, including primary, middle, high and higher secondary schools, around 11.951 million students are enrolled. However, there are just 386,183 teachers for these students, with an average teacher-student ratio of 30.95.

However, there as many as 75,000 posts for teachers vacant in the province. Should the empty seats be filled, the ratio would drop to 26 students to a teacher.

At the same time, there are around 13 million children are out-of-school in Punjab. Most of these children are considered to be working in brick kilns, workshops, factories, houses, hotels and stores. Around 3 million children are believed to be either begging on the streets or wander the streets collecting recyclable items.

Even though Punjab has reported increased enrollment rates of 79 per cent in recent years, the new Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government considers that the number of out-of-school children in the province are too high and need urgent corrective measures. In this regard, the education officers of all 36 districts of the province have been directed to enrol as many as 50,000 to 100,000 out-of-school children before the new academic year begins.

However, this would mean that around 50-60 per cent of children will still remain out of school.



But if all the out-of-school children are enrolled, and all vacant seats for teachers are filled, it will see the teacher-student ratio more than double to 54.1. At that point, the government will need to double the number of teachers in schools.

Per the data, Rahim Yar Khan has the most number of schools of any district of the province at 2,774. It consequently has around 568,127 students. The district also boasts of 17,356 teachers with a teacher-student ratio of 33.

By contrast, Chiniot has the fewest schools of any district in the province with just 697. There are 187,539 students enrolled in these schools and are instructed by 4,753 teachers with a teacher-student ratio of 39.

However, in terms of the number of students, Faisalabad has the most enrolled students at 885,081 students in 2,208 schools. For these students, the city has 22,752 teachers – the most of any district – with a ratio of 39.

Lahore has the second most number of children enrolled in school with 644,433. These children are enrolled in 1,127 schools where 16,383 teachers instruct students with a ratio of 39.

Rawalpindi, though, has the best teacher-student ratio of 22, with 380,344 students enrolled in 1,805 schools with 16,994 teachers. An Alif Ailaan report from 2017 found that Rawalpindi had 296 schools where there were fewer than four teachers and it saw the percentage of schools with fewer than four teachers fall from 70 per cent to just 28 per cent during 2017 alone.

Pakpattan has the worst teacher-student ratio at 40 with 247,011 children enrolled in 858 schools with 6,139 teachers.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 15^th, 2019.