Somewhere in Pakistan right now, a child in Class 5 is sitting in a government school classroom unable to read a sentence from a Class 2 textbook. She is not unusual. She is the norm. Unfortunately, somewhere in Lahore and Larkana, Quetta and Karachi, a market town in Punjab and a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Somewhere is everywhere.
Pakistan is facing two overlapping education crises, and together they demand urgent attention. The first is about children who are not in school at all. Researchers and policymakers are currently locked in a heated dispute over just how many — recent estimates range from 5 million to 25 million, depending on the methodology. But here is what no one disputes: even the most optimistic figure represents millions of children with no school to attend. One child out of school is one too many.
The second crisis is quieter, and in some ways more alarming. It is about the children who do show up in government schools (and low-fee private schools alike), which together serve virtually all of Pakistan’s enrolled students, and still are not learning. The latest ASER survey covering over 183,000 children nationally found that only half of children in Class 5 can read a story in Urdu or the local language, and barely half can do two-digit division — skills that should have been mastered years earlier.
In Class 3, those numbers fall to 12 per cent for reading and 9 per cent for arithmetic. Enrolment numbers may have improved in recent years. Learning has not. A child who sits in class every day but cannot read, cannot add, cannot reason through a basic problem is being failed by a system that counts him or her as a success.
In the face of these numbers, it is fair to ask: Is there any reason for hope?
There is. And the evidence is clear.
Research on high-dosage tutoring, structured, small-group instruction delivered on a near-daily basis, has produced some of the most striking results anywhere in the world. One of the seminal studies, conducted in Chicago, followed over 5,000 ninth and tenth-grade students, the vast majority from low-income households. Students were randomly assigned to receive daily in-school maths tutoring — fifty minutes a day, two students to one tutor for an entire academic year.
What a serious high-dosage tutoring initiative would add is a structured daily block of thirty to forty-five minutes, in which students who are behind receive targeted support in literacy and numeracy, delivered by trained paraprofessionals working alongside classroom teachers
Tutors were trained paraprofessionals, not credentialed teachers, working through a structured curriculum aligned with what students were already learning in class. An RCT, the gold standard of evidence, finds that students who received this support gained the equivalent of one to two and a half additional years of learning compared to peers who did not. Children who were behind caught up. Dramatically.
This is not a one-off finding. A recent meta-analysis reviewing decades of tutoring experiments across dozens of countries found consistent, substantial gains across subjects and age groups in reading as well as mathematics, in early grades as well as secondary school. The evidence base is as strong as anything in education research.
More recently, my colleagues and I have been studying what happens when you integrate technology into this model. The findings show that substituting some tutor time with educational technology can reduce costs by roughly a third and cut the number of tutors needed by half, without compromising how much students learn.
This work was cited in the United States government’s 2025 Economic Report of the President. It also aligns with U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s call to school districts nationwide to adopt high-dosage tutoring as the primary strategy for addressing pandemic-era learning loss recognition that this approach had moved from promising research into mainstream policy.
And the model is not limited to wealthy countries. Evidence from India and Nigeria shows that technology-assisted tutoring can be integrated into government school systems at scale, delivering meaningful gains even in resource-constrained settings. The question is not whether this approach works. It does. The question is whether Pakistan has the will to adapt it.
Here is what makes that adaptation genuinely feasible: Pakistan already has most of what it needs. Government schools exist in virtually every community. A National Curriculum provides a shared foundation. Provincial education departments have the administrative capacity to run large programmes. What a serious high-dosage tutoring initiative would add is a structured daily block of thirty to forty-five minutes, in which students who are behind receive targeted support in literacy and numeracy, delivered by trained paraprofessionals working alongside classroom teachers.
Those paraprofessionals could come from Pakistan’s enormous population of educated young people who are currently underemployed. A programme modelled on initiatives like Teach For Pakistan, recruiting bright graduates who commit for a year or two, requiring relatively little training and sidestepping the turnover concerns that plague permanent hiring, would address two of Pakistan’s most urgent problems at once: the learning gap and youth unemployment. It is the kind of policy that creates value in multiple directions.
Starting with two or three districts, selecting them carefully to reflect different provincial contexts and levels of need, would cost a fraction of what Pakistan spends on education infrastructure and could generate rigorous local evidence within two years about what works and what needs to be adapted.
I write this from Chicago, where my work focuses on designing, testing, and evaluating education policies to improve student learning outcomes. But I grew up in Pakistan, studied here, and began my research career here, working on exactly these questions. What strikes me most, from a distance, is the gap between how much Pakistan’s families value education and how little their children are getting in return for that faith.
The learning crisis is real. The despair is understandable. But the evidence from Chicago, from India, from Nigeria, and from dozens of other contexts offers an answer that is practical, affordable, and proven: invest in getting every child who is behind the intensive, personal support they need to catch up. Not through another commission or another curriculum revision.
Through a tutor, in a small group, every single day. And there is a deeper prize on offer too: if the quality of government schools genuinely improves, the trust of parents in these institutions will follow — and many of the children who are still out of school will come on their own.
It is not too late. But it will not happen on its own.