UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURE, FAISALABAD

Quality of education, Investment in education and

Status of education in Pakistan (Final)
Submitted by : Rizwana Waseem
Reg. no.: 2019-ag-1162
Course: S0C-611(Sociology of Education)
Submitted to: Ms. Asima Rasool
Degree: M.Sc. Sociology(Weekend Program)
Submitted on : 17 May,2020
Semester: Spring (2nd)
Quality of Education:
Quality education enables people to develop all of their attributes and skills to achieve their
potential as human beings and members of society. In the words of the Delors Commission
(UNESCO, 1996): “Education is at the heart of both personal and community development; its
mission is to enable each of us, without exception, to develop all our talents to the full and to
realize our creative potential, including responsibility for our own lives and achievement of our
personal aims.”

 Quality education is a human right and a public good.

 Governments and other public authorities should ensure that a quality education service is
available freely to all citizens from early childhood into adulthood.
 Quality education provides the foundation for equity in society.
 Quality education is one of the most basic public services. It not only enlightens but also
empowers citizens and enables them to contribute to the maximum extent possible to the
social and economic development of their communities.

Increases to the quantity of education – as measured for example by mean years of schooling –
has, for a long time, been the central focus of policy makers and academic debate. While
increasing the access to education is important, the actual goal of providing schooling is to
teach skills and transfer knowledge to students in the classroom. This entry focusses on the
outcomes of schooling – the quality of education.

While we have good empirical data on the access to education we know much less about the
quality of education. Unfortunately, the data on the skills and knowledge of students is sparse
and has limited spatial and temporal coverage. This is in part due to the difficulty and cost of
creating and implementing standardized assessments that can be compared across borders and
time.

Efforts to measure these outcomes are geographically more restricted (often only OECD
countries are included) and even less is known about how the performance of students with
respect to these outcomes has changed over time. A third limitation is that measures are
sometimes not comparable between countries.

Most often these assessment are measuring learning outcomes of one or several of the following
three dimensions:

 Reading and language proficiency

 Mathematics and numeracy proficiency
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  Scientific knowledge and understanding

The assessments differ in respect to how children are selected. While some assessments select
children by their age, there are other assessments which select children by the school grade the
child attends. The aim of these studies is to test a representative random sample of the intended
population.

The most widely available metric on the outcomes of education is literacy. Data and research on
literacy is discussed in detail in our entry on the topic.

Investment in Education:
Today investment in education is one of the most important factors of the development in any
modern country. Our paper finds out of the points of human capital and analyses the proceeds
of investment in education. Investment in education is a necessary investment that certifies
higher productivity in the economy. To measure the proceeds on the educational investment, the
cost-benefit analysis is usually used including the calculation and assessment of all the relevant
costs and benefits. Estimations show that the return on the investment in education is higher
than that on the investment in physical capital. Investment on education has both private and
public returns-individual and social. Individuals with more human capital manage to be very
efficient at their employment search, and less suffer from unemployment. Most educated people
have high labor productivity that effects on the profit of the firm and its market evaluation. Due
to investment in education the profit recently, the macro-economic situation in most EU
countries has changed significantly. At the EU level, in 2004 the main components of public
spending were social protection, general public services and health, and education. It can
change the priority set by an economy. It can reflect country-specific objectives in spending
spheres. In 2005 nearly 90% of investment in education at European level was covered by
public sources. All these transactions are included in the indicator on public investment as a
percentage of Gross Domestic Product. There are many variations between European countries
in this point. In 2005 percentage of GDP was higher than the EU average in 2004. Public
investment on education can suggest a complementary outline on the public effort made by a
country to support its educational system. Many European countries are trying to increase the
public investment on education lately. In some countries (Romania, Hungary or Cyprus) the
public sources allocated to education shown in comparative PPS have witnesses significant
increases between 2000 and 2005 (over 10% annually). High standard annual increases in the
absolute figures of public investment on education between 2000 and 2005 were noted as well
in Ireland and Greece and in more than half of the Members States the standard increase was at
least 5% annually.

Private investment on education:

Private investment on education is becoming important in Europe. Between 2000 and 2005 in
almost all countries the private sources of funding for all compound levels of education have
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increased. In some countries (Finland Sweden) educational structures continue to be mostly
financed from public sources and less than 5% is covered from private sources for another
group of countries ( France, Italy, Lithuania, Poland) private sources of investment accounted
for about 10% of total investment on educational institutions. In four member states (the UK,
Germany, Cyprus, Slovakia) the investment in education from private sources was 16-20%. The
evolution which is available at country level clearly describes the role of the indicators used in
the model, thus other variations across countries can play a role in explanations of the results.
Productivity of investment in education can be affected by different specific factors. More often
these factors are beyond the control of public authorities but they are important in the analysis
and neglecting them may lead to angled measures of efficiency. For example, the educational
competence of adult population could influence the educational outcomes. Investment in
education is beneficial in a variety of ways, both for individuals and for society as a whole.
Secondary education has been displayed to contribute to individual returns and economic
development. It is associated with advanced health, equity and social conditions. And the
quality of secondary education affects the levels above and below it primary and terrier
education. Education in enhances individual productivity, as measures by the well-known link
between educational competence and personal income. At the national level education plays an
important role in cherishing economic development.

Status of Education in Pakistan:

In recent decades there has been a growing international movement to improve access to quality
education. Education is considered a basic human right. The international community’s
declaration for Education for All explicitly aims for universal access to and completion of basic
education, equity, and quality in education.

Countries in the Majority world are taking steps towards universal primary education, and
indeed, around the world, more and more children are enrolling in primary school. However,
many children enrolled in school are not completing school or are moving through the system
without learning the skills schools are expected to teach them. Analysis of grade-disaggregated
data demonstrates that the real crisis is in the earliest grades of primary, with Primary 1 often
having the highest levels drop-out and repetition in many Majority world countries.
Education statistics from UNESCO have findings similar to those attained by the ASER
2011: In Pakistan, primary school enrollment is far from universal, with only 66% of primary
school aged children enrolled in primary school. Almost seven million children are out of
school, and 60% of these are girls. The quality of education in Pakistan has also been found to
be dismal, particularly in government schools and in rural areas. Government schools are often
characterized by severe limitations such as a lack of basic facilities, inadequately trained and
often absent teachers, and a severe shortage of learning materials and books. Similar to the
trends of other countries, the primary school system seems to be failing children right from the
start. Of those children who do enroll in school, less than half complete primary school. The
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drop-out rate is highest in Primary 1 – with approximately one out of every six children who
enroll never making it to second grade.
Given the importance of education for human development, and the significant progress made
in increasing access to primary education, it is concerning that so many children are falling
through the cracks, particularly at the very beginning. Are children not benefitting from the
education system? Are schools not meeting the needs of children? From a rights-based
perspective, all children have a right to learn, and communities and schools have the
responsibility to ensure environments that enable children’s successful learning.

In this context, it becomes critical to understand school-level factors that impact children’s
entry to, adjustment to, and success in – in other words, their ‘transition’ to – early primary.
This is the ‘readiness of schools’ for children – as opposed to the more generally emphasized
and researched ‘readiness of children’ for school. Thus it is necessary to understand
characteristics that make ‘ready schools” – schools that are ready to receive children and enable
their success.

For those who are interested: My doctoral research uses mixed methods to develop a
contextually-grounded understanding of ‘ready schools’ in Pakistan. My study quantitatively
examines school-level factors which are associated with children’s successful entry and
adjustment to primary school in Pakistan, and qualitatively explores perspectives on the early
primary school environment by those involved in it (students, teachers, and parents).

Interestingly, one of the introductory sections of the ASER 2011 report, Dr. Irfan Muzaffar calls
for such an investigation into ‘correlates’ of effective schools – in other words, what are the
characteristics of those schools that are effective in enabling children’s successful learning? I
hope that the findings from my research will contribute to a contextually-grounded
understanding of quality early primary school environments (‘ready schools’) in Pakistan.

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