Athens: Pakistan’s recent government figures have challenged the widely cited estimate of 25 million out-of-school children, with the Household Integrated Economic Survey 2024-25 putting the national out-of-school rate at 28 per cent.
Released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics in January 2026, the survey found that around 20 per cent of children had never enrolled in school, while another 8 per cent had enrolled but later dropped out, a report has stated.
It noted that independent estimates by London-based organisation ‘Save the Children’ put the figure considerably higher, at around 38 per cent.
Despite a constitutional guarantee of free and compulsory education for children aged five to 16, millions of Pakistani children remain outside the education system, leaving the country with the world’s second-largest out-of-school population, according to a report in Athens-based ‘Directus’.
Highlighting the disparities across Pakistan’s provinces, it said, “Khyber Pakhtunkhwa records roughly 34 per cent of school-age children out of school, while Balochistan reaches nearly 69 per cent of its school-age population, the most acute exclusion rate in the country. Additionally, gender compounds geography rather than operating independently of it. In Balochistan, an estimated 75 per cent of girls are out of classrooms altogether, and in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the number of out-of-school girls consistently exceeds that of boys.”
Citing World Bank estimates, the report said 39 per cent of Pakistan’s population, equivalent to about 95 million people, lives below the poverty line, where the cost of schooling turns education from a constitutional entitlement into a calculated financial risk.
“Where a child’s labour carries immediate, tangible value to household survival, the deferred and uncertain return of formal schooling cannot compete on ordinary economic terms. To describe this as parental ‘choice’ obscures the structural constraint under which it is made. Exclusion is not a private failure of aspiration but an institutional outcome of deprivation,” it noted.
According to the report, 15 per cent of school-age children in Islamabad Capital Territory, the state’s administrative showcase, remain out of school, highlighting how deeply educational exclusion has become entrenched across the governance hierarchy rather than being limited to peripheral regions.
“Even where enrollment occurs, presence does not guarantee learning. Pakistan’s literacy rate stands at roughly 60 per cent, and independent assessments have long found that a large majority of 10-year-olds cannot read and comprehend an age-appropriate text. Physical attendance therefore functions as a deceptive proxy for inclusion,” it added.
Criticising the state’s failure to ensure education for all, the report said, “Pakistan’s challenge is consequently not simply enrollment expansion but the dismantling of the economic, geographic and gendered structures that determine who may exercise, in practice, the right the state has already promised on paper. Until public investment and institutional capacity converge with constitutional guarantee, millions of children will continue to inherit not education, but the diminished possibilities its absence creates.”
