At 5:30am the alarm goes off, and by 7am Salma Baig* is out the door, grabbing the bag of papers she has checked up until 10pm the night before. During the recent monsoon season, Salma carried an umbrella in case of rain – along with her teacher's bag full of stationery, course books, students' copies, and her lunch box and water flask. This morning the smog is thick during the drive to school but she must reach an hour before the students arrive. The Punjab government has delayed school timing for students because of the hazardous air quality index.

Among the staff, Salma is a reliable resource. With 25 years of teaching experience in Karachi's top private schools, she recently moved to Lahore and currently teaches at an Islamic school. Given her own educational and professional background, she stands head and shoulders above the newer recruits in the staff, who enter the teaching profession with less professional experience as they are younger and have a different outlook than teachers from Salma's generation. “A teacher younger to me said your kind of teachers are not there any longer. Your values and approach to teaching are nearly extinct. To be honest, during my whole first year in this school, I did not meet a single teacher on the same wavelength as me, as they have not received the kind of training and education I have,” shared Salma.

While she is at school, Salma does not have time to check her phone messages or receive calls. Although at home in the evenings, she attends calls from not just friends and family but junior colleagues asking for help with some assignment or other, the school staff who will sometimes organise online meetings and parents with some concerns about their children's academic progress. This profession of teaching, which is generally relegated to an easy job with convenient timings, especially for women who have children) does not appear to be so if you know a teacher personally. The work of a teacher is not over when the school bell rings in the afternoon and neither is the workload light enough to have your evenings free.

Despite working overtime, a teachers’ pay is not enough income to support a family comfortably. If you consider the time and effort a teacher who is also a mother invests in her work life, the inadequate pay makes it seem like a sacrifice.

While she teaches O level Pakistan Studies and English, Salma also carries out duties including rounding the kids at home time, helping younger teachers with their lessons, going to teacher training workshops, and chaperoning students who participate in competitions outside the campus.

When she returns home it is time to oversee her domestic staff and ensure her children have food when they are back from their respective offices. By 5pm or 6pm she has opened up her laptop to prepare her lesson plans, check copies or tests, and read up for the next day's classes. “Teachers are multitasking all day,” she said; over her shoulder, she told one of her sons that she had warmed dinner for him.

The student to teacher ratio in Pakistan

Available data on student-teacher ratio shows that Pakistan's average student-teacher ratio is nearly twice as high as the world average. “Teachers in Punjab have a high workload because of multiple grade teaching in several schools and on average high student teacher ratios,” according to the Saber Teachers Country report for the World Bank 2018. In 2018, the primary school student teacher ratio was 39:1 and the secondary school student teacher ratio was 31:1, which is higher, compared to better performing educational systems internationally.

For Sindh, the student teacher ratio was 39:1 at primary level, 25:1 at middle school level and 30:1 at upper secondary level, according to the Pakistan Education Statistics 2022-22. These ratios have only increased, meaning the number of students enrolled keeps growing in relation to the number of teachers employed. Naturally, teachers in Pakistan will have work piling up on their desks – and in their homes – if they are looking after bigger and bigger classrooms.

Ideally, Salma suggests, every senior teacher should have a teacher's assistant where the number of students exceeds 30. She personally could use help with presentations and lesson planning or holding online classes – not that she doesn't have the know-how but some of the menial duties and typing would ease her workload and free up some time. “Can you believe that in this day and age, we don't have multimedia and we still have blackboards in the classrooms with chalk making teachers sick?”

The school administration plays an important role in facilitating or neglecting teachers’ requirements and rights. From setting the pay scale to delegating duties to controlling parent-teacher communication, every school has its own policies. Only a few can create healthy workspaces for teachers and pay them a satisfactory salary as well. The majority of schools are run like businesses to make profit. “Parents are called customers by the school authority so we have to deal with them in that way,” Salma said, expressing some consternation. If a school’s authority is based on such a model, it means that their employees will eventually be exploited to do as much work for as little pay as they can manage.

Nadia Sameer began her teaching career right after college and continued when she got married and while she raised her children in Karachi. Having worked at various private schools, including those part of a countrywide chain of schools, one thing is common in all environments: “Too much to do, too little time,” she said. She has worked in schools that pay well, and those that did not. She has taught in Karachi and now is teaching in

Dubai. There are marked differences among the system of education in Pakistan and UAE, of course. Yet everywhere, “Teaching is most definitely a 24/7 job,” she maintains.

“Not only is it marking papers and assignments every day and lesson planning, but parents send emails and demand answers almost immediately,” Nadia explained. Students send messages constantly as well, she said. The parents' WhatsApp groups are a particular annoyance. If one parent brings up something, suddenly all other parents in the group realise it and the next thing you know parents are sending emails to teachers regarding the issue. Constant and ready communication between parents and teachers online creates emergencies in a snowball effect. Consequently, the teachers get buried in an avalanche of demands that parents want to be fulfilled immediately.

“Our school has a rule that teachers must reply to parents but we are given 24 hours,” she said, about her current place of work in Dubai. “Nobody should email after 6pm and before 7am. This rule was recently introduced after complaints from teachers saying they never got any rest and were expected to reply as soon as the messages came.”

Salma echoed this complaint and said preparing a lesson plan for day-to-day classes is a lengthy process as it is. Add to that the ease of access to teachers for students, admin and parents is “very taxing and annoying”.

“Parents, students and admin form a troika and till four o'clock they can approach us,” she said. “Two parents contacted me after 9pm yesterday while I was checking papers. I texted them ‘Busy now, contact on weekend.’” In the last school in Karachi where she taught for a long stint, teachers were not involved in communication with parents directly. Parents of students only had access to the administration and floor or section heads. It was strictly forbidden for teachers to share their phone numbers with students and their parents. “If we shared our phone number it was only secretly, without the admin knowing and only for cases where parents or children desperately wanted some academic guidance, not for tuition,” she explained.

At times, the school places too many expectations on the teachers without providing sufficient resources. The most precious resource being time, teachers are obliged to take on responsibilities other than imparting education.

“Too much admin work takes away the time from focusing on lesson planning,” said Nadia. “Some schools give too little freedom and every teacher is expected to do what is dictated from the head office, which might not necessarily work in her class because all students' dynamics are different. With too many students in one class, the teacher can feel overwhelmed.” If a conscientious teacher cannot give one or two students the attention she would like to give, she is then is forced to give up on all of them since there simply isn't enough time to deliver the objectives that the head office demands and also guide and help the students.

When she started teaching, Nadia was a fresh graduate with computer science being her specialty subject. Yet, just because she spoke good English, she was told to teach English literature instead with the promise that the school would provide her resources and she would learn on the job.

“I taught English literature with the resources they provided, but I was always uncomfortable in class,” she recalled. “I didn't know enough to answer all the questions.” She was teaching grade eight so she could still manage her way through this awkward situation but she still believes the school should not have given her a subject that was not her forte.

“Similarly, again just because I spoke English, they asked me to lead the sports function, something the PE teachers should have done. Which meant an evening gone, with no compensation for it,” she shared.

There is no standard adopted by private schools across the board in Pakistan. Some administrations show no compassion to hardworking teachers who are an asset to all society. A disincentivising work culture at a school reflects poorly on the standard of students graduating out of it. If teachers are not shown respect and the level of education they deliver is not a priority, then the students suffer from subpar learning. “All teachers are not of the same calibre and all do not put in the same effort. Yet a below average teacher gets the same bonus of a mere 3000 rupees after one full year of hard work. No perks are awarded, no Eid bonuses. When a school authority treats you this way they do not let you enjoy life in school,” Salma pointed out.

The fallout is borne by the students. “Students are not up to mark and the same students become teachers. Over the years, I have seen the students I get have very weak basics. They have no general knowledge and poor mannerisms. Primary education is vital to lay a solid foundation for secondary schooling,” said Salma, talking about the values she has seen disappear from the sphere of learning in urban Pakistan.

“Children have lost respect for everyone, including teachers. They don't say salaam or good morning and overall their behaviour is sloppy and careless,” said the senior teacher. This is a reflection of poor management and lower standards of hiring teachers.

“Teachers should not be hired without training and if they have low standards, they cannot impart quality education,” she concluded.

Nadia also highlighted the importance of professional development for educators.

“In Dubai, they believe that even if you have been teaching 20 years, you should still get professionally more developed,” she shared. She recommended continuing professional development (CPD) for teachers in Pakistan as well.

“The selection process for hiring teachers should also be transparent and merit based,” added Nadia. “Here, at every level you're meant to give exams but can't go higher without the certification.”

Committed and able educators are found few and far between. They are role models who shape our future generations and contribute to our society with sincerity and diligence. They should be lauded for their sacrifice and daily endeavours and treated with the respect their status deserves in the professional world. Their recommendations and suggestions to improve the role of teachers in Pakistan should be given serious consideration for the sake of our society.