Analysing Educational Waste in the Punjab Schools

Abstract

This paper examines educational waste in the Punjab Public Schools. The paper focuses upon three areas: schools’ internal efficiency, school capacity utilisation and student teacher ratio. By using cohort analysis technique, the paper measures waste in flows of students in the education cycle. The results show that repetition and dropout are more prevalent in class I and middle school classes. This implies that after having studied for five to six years in schools, a student finds themselves in a blind alley, not knowing where it all would end up. This also suggests that majority of the schools are located at large distance from the most of the population of the Punjab and students have to travel long distance for attending the schools. The under-utilisation of school capacity is more prevalent in rural area than that of urban areas and girls schools are more under-utilised than the boys schools. The under-utilisation is more widespread in boys schools of urban areas than the girls schools located in same vicinity and girls school in rural areas are more under-utilised than the boys schools. The pervasive theme emerged from results is that girls schools and teachers are mostly under-utilised. This reflects that disadvantage that girls face in Pakistan which may also cause under-utilisation of girls schools.