Decline of Public Schools in Punjab and Strategies for their Revival

Abstract

The government of Pakistan has legal bindings and international commitments to provide education to its each and every citizen irrespective of gender, caste, creed, and race. Public school system in Pakistan works under the auspices of federal, provincial, and district governments, and offer education to masses. There are sufficient empirical evidences to support the idea that public schools have been experiencing a declining trend on different indicators like quality of students’ learning and outputs, enrolments of students, and parent dissatisfaction, etc. During discussions with experts and informed stakeholders, it was identified that public schools in Punjab are declining due to some social, governmental, and school related problems. This study was held to investigate the in-school factors which resulted decline of public schools in Punjab. The main objective of the study was to identify school-related problems of public schools in Punjab (Pakistan) and then propose strategies for the revival of these schools. Four main stakeholders of schooling i.e. the head teachers, teachers, parents, and students made the population of the study. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select the sample from the population. To select a representative sample, 36 districts of Punjab were distributed in three strata on the basis of their educational indicators and two districts from each stratum were selected randomly. In the next stage, one tehsil from each district was randomly selected. Six secondary or higher secondary schools were conveniently selected from each tehsil to select the respondents for the study. In this way, the valid responses of 36 head teachers, 263 teachers, 282 parents, and 802 students from public schools were received for the study. A semi-structured interview protocol regarding school governance and management was developed for the head teachers; a job satisfaction scale was adapted for the teachers; a structured interview was developed to measure parents’ satisfaction with public schools; and school learning environment scale was developed for students of public schools. The research instruments were validated by experts and then pilot tested. The study found that the schools faced scarcity of funds to improve teaching learning process. Furthermore, the head teachers had no real administrative authority and their too heavy administrative duties were detrimental to their role as instructional leader. The head teachers were not satisfied with their promotion policy, monitoring and accountability mechanism, working relationship with district administration, and the competency building trainings. The teachers also showed their dissatisfaction with their service structure and working environment of the public schools. The parents were not satisfied with the quality of teaching and role of schools in overall personality development of their children. The students, parents, and head teachers agreed that there was lack of communication between school and parents. Furthermore, almost all of them agreed that physical and learning facilities were available but not properly utilized. On the basis of the findings of the study, strategies were suggested to revive public schools in Punjab (Pakistan). The major suggestion in the proposed strategies focus on increasing budget for schools, financial and administrative empowerment of head teachers, changes in service structure of head teachers and teachers, improve quality of teaching, effective utilization of physical and learning resources, communication between school and parents, and activate community participation.