Punjab, Pakistan: Acting on all fronts to get children in school and learning
Story highlights
- The TALEEM program, funded by a GPE $50.6 million grant, is helping the government of Punjab bring more children to school to receive a quality education.
- TALEEM is using a holistic approach to reach as many out-of-school children as possible, give teachers the right skills, renovate school buildings, include children with disabilities, and improve data collection to help the School Education Department make informed decisions.
- Thanks to this work, close to 130,000 children previously out of school are learning and as many teachers have received training, paving the way for better education outcomes in Punjab.
The TALEEM program (Transformation in Access, Learning, Equity and Education Management) funded by a GPE US$50.6 million grant, is helping the government of Punjab bring more children to school to receive a quality education.
The program is using a variety of approaches to reach as many out-of-school children as possible, give teachers the right skills, renovate school buildings, include children with disabilities, and improve data collection to make informed decisions.
One of the approaches is the afternoon school program, which has already enrolled 92,000 children – girls in particular – who were previously without options beyond primary.
Non-formal education centers give children a lifeline
Yashwa Saleem, 15, is in grade 5. He studies with his teacher Iqra Akbar in the non-formal education center of Block E Johar Town in Lahore.
Zahra Asraf, 13, attends grade 3 at the same non-formal education center. After school, from 1:30 to about 11 p.m., she works in a dentist’s office as an assistant.
Yashwa, 15, and Zahra, 13, go to school six mornings a week at the non-formal education center, Block E Johar Town, Ferozian Wala, in Lahore. In the afternoons, Yashwa works as an upholsterer in a furniture business and Zahra is a dental assistant. They both have very long days.
Zahra learned about the center through her cousins who were attending class there. She was assessed in English, Urdu and mathematics, and based on her results, enrolled in grade 3.
In the non-formal education center, about 60 children fit into two small rooms on the third floor of a home. With their shoes neatly placed on racks at the entrance, they sit on mats on the floor in front of small plastic stools used as desks, their textbooks open on them.
Children range in age from about 4 to 15 and the center goes from kindergarten to grade 5, which initially made instruction complicated for teacher Iqra Akbar.
She received two trainings, during which she learned that it was better to focus on one subject per day. This simplifies lessons for her and allows children at different levels to help each other. She will get a third training this year under TALEEM.
Teachers are trained in specific methods to teach children in the non-formal and often multi-grade settings, using an accelerated curriculum.
“You have to develop the children’s interest first and then you can teach them. This advice helped me manage different children at the same time."
Iqra is proud that several children she taught through grade 5 have been able to enroll in public schools and continue their education through grade 10 (the end of basic education).
The government of Punjab opted to open non-formal education centers in locations where no public schools are available, existing schools are already full, or when children are over age for their grade level and thus can't enroll in regular schools.
Non-formal education centers have been an education lifeline for hundreds of thousands of children in Punjab. The GPE-funded TALEEM program is providing resources to scale up the outreach and enhance the quality of this essential education pathway.
Through TALEEM, 1,000 non-formal education centers, each with one teacher, have been established, enrolling 37,000 children between the ages of 5 and 18 in one year (48% boys, 52% girls).
This is close to the program's target of 40,000 children enrolled in these centers. To enroll children, 50 local mobilizers received a 3-day training on community mobilization.
The non-formal centers are already showing impressive results: an assessment held in September 2023 of children in "package A”, which covers nursery and grade 1, showed a 94% passing rate. For package B (grades 2 and 3), 97% of children passed, and in package C (grades 4 and 5), 98% of children passed.
"Studying in school is helping me a lot, especially in mathematics. It helps with accounting and to do proper records."
Yashwa also says that if it was possible, he would prefer to go to school full time because he can't learn at work what he learns in school, and Zahra echoes his words.
Giving the right tools to children with disabilities
The Special Education Center in Johar Town, Lahore, has two large buildings, one for elementary school and one for college. The building we visited has large hallways and a multi-level ramp instead of stairs to go up the floors, allowing students with reduced mobility or vision to move around easily.
The elementary school welcomes 221 students and the college close to 400, 90 of whom can live on premises if their home is too far away. Buses bring local students to school in the morning and take them back home in the afternoon. All services are free, including the assistive devices students received under the TALEEM program: custom-fitted wheelchairs, electric wheelchairs, white canes and hearing aids.
Abdullah, a student who received an electric wheelchair, said: “My dream came true!”
To date, 616 assistive devices have been distributed, making life a bit easier for each of these students and their families.
Two months ago, Fizza Sarfraz, 10, received an electric wheelchair provided under the GPE-funded TALEEM program. She read the user manual to understand how it worked and now the chair allows her to be more independent.
Syed Muhamad Hassan Raza, 22, is deaf. He is studying for a bachelor’s degree at the Special Education Center in Lahore. He is set to receive his first hearing aid soon through the GPE-funded TALEEM program.
"There are 39,000 children with disabilities in Punjab and 300 special education schools. Our vision is to give students assistive devices, then mainstream them into regular schools."
Special education colleges exist in every district of Punjab. The province is set to finalize an inclusive education strategy, which mandates open admission to all children in all districts and training for all teachers on inclusive education.
With limited resources, Saima Saeed explains that maintaining two parallel education systems is unsustainable, and inclusive education for all children in the same schools is recommended.
The TALEEM program is piloting special education support and the results will be assessed to see how activities can be expanded to the rest of the province.
The work on special education under TALEEM is cross-sectoral, as the health ministry carried out screenings to identify children with disabilities in need of assistive devices: more than 330,000 children in regular schools and 36,000 children in special education schools were screened by health and nutrition officers.
To date, 4,600 teachers have been trained in inclusive education and more than 1,050 schools have been retrofitted with accessible infrastructure.
Training teachers with the right skills
TALEEM trained close to 4,000 teachers with content knowledge and pedagogical skills in English, math and science for grades 6 through 8.
To reach the ratio of 1 teacher for 40 students that Punjab aspires to, the province needs to hire 100,000 new teachers.
Under every component of the TALEEM program, whether in formal or non-formal education, teacher training features as a core element, since the government understands the prominent place teachers play in ensuring quality learning.
The Quaid-e-Azam Academy for Educational Development (QAED) is the department in charge of developing teacher training modules, organizing training sessions, monitoring and reporting on progress and results.
Under TALEEM, QAED has set up a learning management system that helps collect and manage large datasets on teachers' career and performance.
Through this system, some of the tedious, paper-based administrative processes used in managing a large teacher workforce of nearly 180,000 teachers have been moved online.
Nevertheless, hiring such a large number of teachers will take time, so QAED is also hiring and training assistant education officers who carry out classroom observations; they visit each school under their purview twice a month, provide feedback to teachers, coach and mentor them, and track their progress.
Learning modules have been uploaded on tablets under TALEEM and distributed to 32,383 primary schools.
Headteachers and teachers use the tablets to take the online training modules, and QAED can keep track of their progress through the learning management system.
"When I first got the training, it helped me to understand how to teach younger kids, so now there’s no issue to teach multigrade."
Screenshot of the learning management system app to manage the teaching workforce and teacher training.
Distribution of new tablets to primary school headteachers.
"Thanks to the training, I gained new teaching skills. Before attending the training program, I didn’t know how to involve the children, how to make groups or how to interact with the children to improve learning outcomes. But during the training program, I learned how to involve children in the learning process with activity-based learning."
To date, QAED has trained more than 126,000 primary school teachers on basic teaching skills, reaching more than half of TALEEM's target.
Improving schools with new toilets and drinking water
It's important to give children access to clean drinking water in school, as well as functioning toilets and handwashing stations. Not only does it ensure that they stay healthy, but studying in good conditions also positively impacts learning results.
This is why TALEEM is investing in the rehabilitation of water and sanitation facilities in 11,000 schools throughout the province, re-allocating $5 million of the GPE grant to these activities after the 2022 floods devastated the country.
Water filtration systems, handwashing stations and repaired toilets have already been completed in more than 1,500 schools in 30 districts.
Capturing, analyzing and using data to inform policies
The government of Punjab understood that to support efficient and evidence-based decision making, it needed a high-performing, centralized data system. Different systems and databases already existed in the various departments overseeing the sector, but it was difficult for decision makers to make sense of so many different data sources. This is why the creation of a state-of-the-art data center to manage the integrated management information system (IMIS) was included in TALEEM.
Data in the IMIS come from schools, assistant education officers and district-level monitoring education assistants. Each school has a unique identifier, as does each student. The IMIS includes a school locator application, which allows visualization of the location of each school by name and district (tehsil) and gives exact directions to be able to visit – a valuable tool especially for assistant education officers who spend most of their time visiting schools under their purview.
Eventually, all other databases will be consolidated into the IMIS, which will allow the School Education Department to make better-informed decisions and target support where it is most needed. The IMIS and data center will outlive the TALEEM program and serve as the one-stop solution for all data needs about all schools, students and teachers in Punjab.
The servers at the PMIU data center handle millions of data. The room next door houses air conditioning equipment to cool the servers.
Staff of the PMIU data center can follow the arrival and treatment of data from thousands of schools in Punjab in real time.
Large monitors at the PMIU data center show the various indicators tracked in real time by the integrated management information system.
A holistic approach sets Punjab on the right track
"The TALEEM program has been a holistic program that has covered pretty much all the avenues of education in Punjab. The program has provided us with a very efficient local education group.
Now we have all the stakeholders under one umbrella, whenever we need to take any decision regarding education, we can make use of that forum.
The success of TALEEM has helped us redevelop our confidence with the other development partners. The sector is so large and the clientele is in such great numbers that single support from a single development partner is probably never going to be sufficient.
I must say what GPE has managed to do for us is that it has rebirthed our trust in the eyes of other development partners and has made us a lot more reliable."
Kalsoom Saqib, special secretary, School Education Department
The TALEEM program funded by GPE will continue implementation until 2026, reaching even more students with quality teachers, enrolling more children into school, giving children with disabilities the devices they need, and rehabilitating more schools.
The systems put in place under TALEEM will help Punjab continue to improve its performance in the education sector, but also, as noted by Special Secretary Kalsoom Saqib, to attract more funding from other partners to expand activities and accelerate progress. The children of Punjab deserve no less
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