Peshawar: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa cannot afford to overlook its education emergency as millions of children remain deprived of their basic right to education.
With about 4.9 million children reportedly out of school, the challenge extends far beyond classrooms and education laboratories in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where private schools are sucking bloods of people.
Most of Govt schools lack basic facilities such as washrooms, boundary walls, rooms, labs and teachers in KP where poverty forces children into work, and areas where distance and inadequate infrastructure keep children particularly girls away from education.
Education experts said that the provincial government, led by Chief Minister Muhammad Sohail Afridi, faces a critical test of translating its stated commitment to public welfare into measurable progress in school enrollment, retention and learning besides addressing the issue of missing facilities.
Agitational long marches and political activity may dominate headlines, but education shapes generations. Every child kept out of school today represents a lost opportunity for the province tomorrow.
For the KP government, the challenge is to ensure that schools are accessible, teachers are present, basic facilities are available, and children who have never entered a classroom or who have dropped out are brought back into the education system.
Every morning, as school bells ring across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, millions of children remain on the wrong side of the classroom door, many because of socioeconomic imbalances.
Fourteen-year-old Hamza Khan, a resident of Nowshera, is one of them who works from dawn to dusk at an auto workshop to financially support his family.
Instead of carrying schoolbooks, Hamza now carries auto-repair tools, diagnosing and fixing faults in vehicles from sunrise till night.
‘My father wanted to see me become a police officer,’ Hamza says, his voice breaking. ‘But after his untimely death, I left school to help repay the loans borrowed for his treatment.’
For Hamza, the classroom has been replaced by an auto workshop, and his father’s dream has been overtaken by the daily struggle for survival.
‘I feel sad when I see other children going to school,’ he says quietly. His story is painfully ordinary in a province where educational exclusion has reached a critical scale.
According to the 2023 Population and Housing Census conducted by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), the number of children aged 5-16 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa stands at 13.13 million and of these, 4.924 million, or 37.49 percent, are out of school mostly busy in labour work.
The gender divide is even more pronounced, with 2.924 million girls out of school compared with around 2 million boys. In other words, nearly four out of every ten children of school-going age in the province are outside the education system in KP.
The education dilemma is particularly severe for girls, especially in less-developed districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where about 46.23 percent of girls aged 5-16 are out of school, compared with 29.37 percent of boys.
In rural areas, the gap widens further, with 49.13 percent of girls and 30.76 percent of boys outside school.
PBS district-level data shows some of the highest out-of-school rates in the country in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Kolai Palas Kohistan recorded an out-of-school rate of 83.29 percent among children aged 5-16, followed by Lower Kohistan at 79.38 percent and Upper Kohistan at 79.36 percent.
Behind every percentage is a child who may be working, caring for younger siblings, travelling long distances to reach school, living too far from a functioning educational institution, or growing up in a household unable to absorb the costs associated with schooling.
In many impoverished communities, education competes directly with poverty.
When a family struggles to put food on the table, a child’s labour can become an economic necessity rather than a choice.
For girls, the barriers can be compounded by distance, inadequate facilities, household responsibilities and social expectations.
The result is a cycle that is difficult to break as poverty keeps children out of school, lack of education limits their future opportunities, and low household income can pass the same deprivation from one generation to the next.
Professor Dr Muhammad Ibrahim, former Director of Education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, described education as fundamental to social progress and stressed that access to education is a constitutional right.
He said the infrastructure deficit in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa adds another layer to the problem. In underserved areas, families face schools with inadequate classrooms and basic facilities, while distance and accessibility remain significant obstacles, particularly for girls.
The census figures also show that the problem is not limited to children who have never entered a classroom. Of the 4.924 million out-of-school children identified by the 2023 Census, about 4.259 million had never attended school, while around 665,000 had attended school but subsequently dropped out.
Wajid Ali Khan, former environment minister said that PTI despite tall promises has failed to introduce uniformed system of education.
Instead to bring these children under education net, he said CM Afridi was concentrating on an aimless long march and agitation politics.
Wajid Khan said the province faces two simultaneous challenges such as bringing first-time pupils into classrooms and preventing those already enrolled from leaving them.
He said results of public sector schools are often poor and most of families prefer to enroll their children in private schools for sake of their bright future.
He said the challenge now confronts the government of Chief Minister Muhammad Sohail Afridi, whose administration has publicly placed service delivery and public welfare among its stated priorities.
For the Afridi government, however, progress on education will ultimately be measured by whether the number of children outside school begins to fall.
He said the scale of the task demands more than another enrolment campaign, adding the government needs to know where out-of-school children live, why they are not attending school and what intervention can realistically bring them into or back into education system.
For one child, the answer may be financial assistance and for another, it may be access to a nearby school. For a girl, it could mean a safe route to school, female teachers, a functioning toilet or a school located close enough to make regular attendance feasible for her family.
For a working child such as Hamza, simply opening the school gate may not be enough. His family may first need an alternative means of income so that it can survive without relying on his earnings.
This is why the province’s education crisis is also an economic challenge. Every child who remains outside school represents not only an educational loss but a future worker, professional, entrepreneur, teacher or public servant whose potential may never be fully realised.
The census has provided a clear baseline that about 4.924 million children aged 5-16 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are currently outside the education system.
The next challenge is turning that baseline into a roadmap for action. The government can begin by identifying out-of-school children district by district; targeting the poorest households; prioritising girls and districts with the highest exclusion rates; improving school infrastructure; addressing teacher shortages and attendance; strengthening retention programmes; and publishing regular, independently verifiable progress figures.
Special stipends to street children will help motivate them to students especially by opening second shifts.
For Hamza, the education crisis is not an abstract policy debate but it is the difference between spending his days repairing vehicles and pursuing the dream his father once imagined for him.
Across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, millions of children are waiting for that difference to be made.
The question confronting the Afridi government is ultimately one of measurable outcomes whether the province can ensure that more children enter and remain in classrooms, rather than allowing another generation to remain outside them.