In association with The Sustainable Development Policy Institute
May 2013 Alif Ailaan
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CONTENTS
Foreword ........................................................................................................................................................... v Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 1 Methodology ..................................................................................................................................................... 1 Scope of the rankings ................................................................................................................................... 1 Education index ............................................................................................................................................. 2 Access ....................................................................................................................................................... 2 Attainment ................................................................................................................................................. 3 Achievement .............................................................................................................................................. 3 Gender parity ............................................................................................................................................. 3 Calculating the education score ................................................................................................................ 4 School index .................................................................................................................................................. 4 Limitations ..................................................................................................................................................... 4 Data sources ................................................................................................................................................. 5 Education index Provinces and territories National rankings ...................................................................... 6 School index Provinces and territories National rankings ........................................................................... 6 Education index Districts and agencies National rankings ......................................................................... 7 School index Districts and agencies National rankings ............................................................................ 11 Education index Azad Jammu and Kashmir District rankings .................................................................. 15 Education index Balochistan District rankings .......................................................................................... 15 Education index Federally Administered Tribal Areas District rankings ................................................... 16 Education index Gilgit-Baltistan District rankings ..................................................................................... 16 Education index Islamabad Capital Territory District rankings ................................................................. 16 Education index Khyber Pakhtunkhwa District rankings ........................................................................... 17 Education index Punjab District rankings ................................................................................................. 18 Education index Sindh District rankings ................................................................................................... 19 School index Azad Jammu and Kashmir District rankings ....................................................................... 20 School index Balochistan District rankings ............................................................................................... 20 School index Federally Administered Tribal Areas District rankings ........................................................ 21 School index Gilgit-Baltistan District rankings .......................................................................................... 21 School index ICT District rankings ............................................................................................................ 21 School index Khyber Pakhtunkhwa District rankings ................................................................................ 22 School index Punjab District rankings ...................................................................................................... 23 School index Sindh District rankings ........................................................................................................ 24 District scorecards .......................................................................................................................................... 25
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FOREWORD
Bismillah irr Rahman irr Raheem
The Alif Ailaan Pakistan District Education Rankings 2013 is a pioneering effort to enhance the quality of political debate around education in Pakistan.
The objective of having a district ranking is to localise the debate about education. As the Alif Ailaan campaign has sought to remind Pakistanis this election season, the big picture in education is stark and demands urgent action. An out-of-school population of 25 million children between 5 and 16 years of age is no small matter.
However, that is not the end of the conversation. In fact, it is just the beginning. There is no magic wand that will put every child in school and ensure that each one of them receives a quality education. It will happen one child at a time, one better teacher at a time, and one improved school at a time. The single place where these individual changes will aggregate is at the district.
The Pakistani district is a contested political idea. Advocates for local government see the district as the most vital unit of governance, while advocates of the need to deepen provincial control over national resources argue that without consolidated provincial powers, true decentralisation cannot be realised.
Regardless of how decentralisation and local government take shape in the future, the most coherent unit of government, above that of the individual school, is the district. Districts have provincially allocated budgets, administrative heads (District Coordination Officers or DCOs) and, most importantly, departments for education, headed by Executive District Officers (EDOs).
How well districts perform therefore is not an abstract construct, but a concrete representation of the level of effort that has been invested in a given district. Moreover, district administrations are where the execution of policy takes place, both in terms of broad prioritisation and specific public-sector investments through the development budget. When political representatives, like MNAs and MPAs, win a new school or a school upgrade for their constituencies, they are really adding to the complement of public infrastructure in a given districtso a districts performance is also a reflection of political action.
The Alif Ailaan campaign has deliberately included all districts in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), and Free or Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK). These areas all receive taxpayer funds and are therefore, to various degrees, within the domain of the political, administrative and fiscal conversations in Pakistan.
By publishing these rankings, the Alif Ailaan campaign seeks to stimulate conversation and debate around two things. First, the methodology of ranking districts around a topic like education and, second, a series of questions (and answers) about why different districts have been ranked higher or lower than what people
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may have expected. No one is ever happy with any rankingand this is as it should be. There is nothing to celebrate about the state of education in Pakistan.
The principal author for the Alif Ailaan Pakistan District Education Rankings 2013 is Asif Saeed Memon of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), with contributions from the Data and Evidence team at Alif Ailaan, led by Saman Naz. SDPIs Hamza Abbas, Junaid Zahid, Safwan A. Khan and Safyan Kakakhel have also been instrumental to the research that has produced this report.
A core group of experts and scholars was consulted on the methodology and process that was used to arrive at the rankings. Their input not only added value but also generated a number of changes and additions to the section of the report that details the limitations of the data and the methodology. Special thanks are due to them all, including Dr. Faisal Bari of the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, Dr. Salman Humayun of the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences, Abbas Rashid of the Society for the Advancement of Education, and Mariam Chughtai of Harvard University.
Ultimately, we at Alif Ailaan see these rankings as an instrument to stimulate a political conversation about education. Between now and the publication of our 2014 rankings, inshaAllah, we will seek to reduce the limitations and expand the network of contributors and peer reviewers. To this end, all readers interested are urged to write to us, and engage with us.
Mosharraf Zaidi
Team Leader Alif Ailaan Campaign
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INTRODUCTION
The Alif Ailaan Pakistan District Education Rankings 2013 is an in-depth assessment of the state of education in the country. This ground-breaking study, conducted in association with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), brings together a range of key education indicators to develop a system of ranking the quality of schooling in every district, region, agency and territory. Two sets of data are analysed: the education index looks at variations in access, attainment, achievement and gender balance, while the school index is based on the availability of essential infrastructure and facilities. The results are used to generate a scorecard for every district.
The Alif Ailaan campaign aims to bring education to the forefront of public discourse in Pakistan. The district education rankings show how widely standards vary across the country. It is our hope that the findings of this report will serve as the basis for a more informed debate on the urgent need for education reform in Pakistan.
METHODOLOGY
The district rankings in this study have been developed using two sets of data. The education index looks at four variablesaccess, attainment, achievement and gender balanceto calculate a composite education score. The school index is based on five key indicators related to infrastructure and the availability of facilities: electricity, drinking water, toilets, boundary walls and the satisfactory condition of school buildings. A composite score is calculated for each index.
Scope of the rankings
For this ranking system to serve as a meaningful tool to assess the state of education in Pakistan, it is essential to include data from every district in the country. There are a total of 145 districts in Pakistan, covering the provinces of Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh; the regions of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and Gilgit-Baltistan (formerly known as the Northern Areas); the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (including the Tribal Agencies and the Frontier Regions); and the Islamabad Capital Territory. However, complete statistics for every district are not available. In some cases, data collection is difficult as a result of security concerns. In the case of new districts created recently, information on all indicators is not yet available. 1 The rankings nevertheless take into account the majority of Pakistans districts. The education index covers a total of 140 districts, while the school index includes 144 districts.
The district rankings focus on primary education. Although higher levels of schooling are no doubt important, the major challenge of education reform in Pakistan lies at the primary level. Improvement in the education system will flow from improved access, retention and quality at the primary level.
1 Tor Ghar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa became a new district in 2011 and new data are not yet available for all indicators. Data on some tribal areas (North Waziristan and South Waziristan) are limited.
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It is worth noting that these rankings are based on publicly available published data. Information used to develop the rankings is sourced from the latest versions of three national datasets: the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS) and the Pakistan Standards of Living Measurement Survey (PSLM).
An attempt has been made to use the most recent data source. However, where 2012 statistics for a particular district are missing, information for the year 2011 has been used instead. A complete list of data sources appears at the end of this chapter.
Education index
The cue for the development of an education index for Pakistan came from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Education For All Development Index (EDI), 2 which includes indicators for access, attainment, literacy and gender parity. The Alif Ailaan education index is a composite score based on four indicators related to access, attainment, achievement and gender balance (see Table 1). The method by which the scores are calculated is discussed below. Table 1: Education index Variable Indicator Source of data Access Gross enrolment rate for 6 to 10 year olds PSLM, ASER Attainment Survival rate to 5th grade NEMIS Achievement Literacy rate of over 10 year olds PSLM Achievement scores of 5th graders (reading and arithmetic) ASER Gender parity Gender parity index based on ratio of female and male students NEMIS
Access
Access is represented by the gross enrolment rate (GER) at the district level. The GER is calculated as the total number of students enrolled in primary school divided by the total number of children aged 6-10 years (primary-school-going age) in the district. The GER of children aged 6-10 is taken from the annual PSLM report 2010-11. Where district data are not available in the PSLM (as in the case of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Gilgit-Baltistan), GER numbers are taken from the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2012.
Since the GER can be greater than 100, rates are adjusted by dividing each data point by the largest data point (in this case, the district of Jhelum with a GER of 120). This operation gives Jhelum an enrolment score of 100 and every other districts GER is then a ratio of Jhelums GER.
It is important to point out that the net enrolment rate (NER) is a more commonly used indicator of access. The NER is calculated by dividing those children of school-going age who are enrolled by all children of
2 UNESCO 2012, Education for All Global Monitoring Report, available at http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/ED/pdf/gmr2012-report-edi.pdf.
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school-going age. However, the PSLM dataset provides the NER only for districts in the four provinces and not for those in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Since the ASER dataset provides GER data for these areas, GER was chosen for consistency.
Attainment
Attainment in education usually refers to the continual ascent of a student through consecutive years of schooling. For the purposes of these rankings, the survival rate to 5th grade has been used as the indicator for attainment. This is calculated as the proportion of children enrolled in the 1st grade who are expected to arrive in the 5th grade. Survival rate scores are extracted from the NEMIS 2010-11 dataset. Here too the ratio for many districts is greater than 100. These are also adjusted by making the ratio for the highest district 100, and adjusting the remaining figures accordingly.
Achievement
For the purposes of calculating district-level achievement, four different data points are combined. First, overall district-level literacy rates are extracted from the PSLM. The literacy rate used is for children over the age of 10. This is the proportion of the population over the age of 10 years who can perform a basic reading exercise (a sentence) in any language (English, Urdu or a regional language).
This indicator is slightly removed from our focus on primary schooling in that it includes members of the population who may be several decades removed from primary schooling. In order to compensate for this variation, achievement scores from ASER 2011 and 2012 have been incorporated.
The ASER includes data on achievement in Urdu (ability to read a story), English (ability to read a sentence) and mathematics (ability to divide a 3-digit number over a 1-digit number). ASER reports these statistics in the form of the percentage of children surveyed who are capable of performing these tasks satisfactorily. The average number for 5th-graders has been used for our rankings.
The achievement score for each district is calculated by taking the arithmetic average of the following variables: the district literacy rate (from the PSLM), the district average of those able to read Urdu or a regional language, English reading ability and mathematics ability. This score is also out of 100.
Gender parity
The gender parity score combines the gender ratios of enrolment (access) and survival to 5th grade. This provides an indicator that captures the gender balance at both the entry point to primary schooling and the end point of primary schooling.
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Raw data for the number of boys and girls enrolled in primary school are taken from the National Education Management Information System (NEMIS) data produced by the Academy for Education Planning and Management (AEPAM). For survival, gender parity figures are taken from NEMIS data.
Two gender ratios are calculated (enrolment and survival) by dividing the number of girls by the number of boys. Where the ratio is greater than 100 (more girls than boys), the ratio is inverted (boys divided by girls). This might appear counter-intuitive at first, since increasing access to education for girls is vitally important in Pakistan. But gender parity should in fact be the broader goal so a greater ratio of girls to boys is also detrimental in the long run.
For the gender parity score, gender ratios for enrolment and survival are averaged.
Calculating the education score
To calculate the overall education score, the arithmetic average of the enrolment, survival, achievement and gender parity scores is used. Equal weight has been given to enrolment, achievement, attainment (survival rate) and gender parity. This method is based on the assumption that each constituent variableaccess, attainment, achievement and gender parityis equally important when it comes to educating all of Pakistans children. Varying weights introduce value judgments to the process.
School index
The district school rankings are developed on the basis of five indicators that reflect the availability of facilities: electricity, drinking water, toilets, boundary walls and the satisfactory/safe condition of the school building.
In this case data for the rankings is extracted from NEMIS. The number of primary schools that meet the requisite conditions in each district is divided by the total number of primary schools in that district. This provides a numerical value for each indicator. The school score is the average of these five numbers. Once again, each indicator is weighted equally.
Limitations
There are some limitations in our attempt to rank districts by the indicators we selected for the study, as follows: By using aggregate numbers at the district level, intra-district variation is not captured. This means that the education score for any given district ignores variations in the standard of education between cities, tehsils and villages within that district. The focus on primary education means that trends in middle and secondary school are not included in the rankings.
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Using the literacy rate means that the rankings include (to some extent) the reading abilities of individuals who have been out of the formal schooling system for many years as well as those who have never been to school. This part of the achievement score covers a segment of the population that is not in direct contact with the education system. Although the net enrolment rate (NER) is more widely accepted as a good measure of access, the gross enrolment rate (GER) is used for purposes of consistency, since the NER was not available for all districts. The gender parity score does not take into account the gender ratio of the underlying population. Where 2012 data for a particular indicator are not available, 2011 statistics are used. This is done to ensure that as many districts as possible are included in the rankings. However, this means that in some cases data from different years is used. For the Islamabad Capital Territory, ASER 2012 data only record achievement scores from rural households. As a result, the achievement score for Islamabad may be understated. Also for Islamabad, the school score is based on three indicators of infrastructure (electricity, drinking water and toilets). This is because publicly available data do not contain statistics related to boundary walls or the condition of buildings. Considering the availability of electricity to calculate the school index means that the score is inherently biased against rural schoolsand hence rural districtswhich are less likely to have electricity connections. While the PSLM and ASER surveys are household surveys, the NEMIS census of schools only includes government schools. This means that some of the data is not representative of the entire school system, missing out on private schools. Since ASER, NEMIS and PSLM use different (albeit similar) sampling methodologies, there is a risk in aggregating and combining data from three separate datasets.
Data sources
The sources used to develop the Alif Ailaan Pakistan District Education Rankings 2013 are:
1. Annual Status of Education Report 2011 2. Annual Status of Education Report 2012 3. National Education Management Information System 2010-11 4. National Education Management Information System 2008-09 5. Pakistan Standard of Living Measurement Survey 2010-11
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EDUCATION INDEX PROVINCES AND TERRITORIES NATIONAL RANKINGS
The Districts below are not ranked due to insufficient data South Waziristan Agency 8.73 - - - 34.91 Kurram Agency 15.36 - - 4.00 57.45 FR Kohat 15.21 - - 38.00 22.85 North Waziristan Agency 26.32 - - 42.00 63.30
EDUCATION INDEX GILGIT-BALTISTAN DISTRICT RANKINGS