Concept Note: Draft

The policy roundtable titled, “Uniformity, Diversity & Equity in Pakistan’s Complex Education
Landscape”, presents itself as a platform for a comprehensive and critical debate among select
academics, policymakers, and stakeholders from the public and private sector to deliberate on the
aspiration of a uniform system of education and the potential for governance under the proposed
system, whilst acknowledging diversity as consequential to determining inclusive formulation and
successful implementation of reforms in Pakistan’s education service delivery.

The roundtable intends to inform future policy proposals through elaborate discussions to provide
strategic direction to the government to move towards an evidence-driven, implementable
solutions.

The roundtable will therefore aim to:

i. Understand the nature of issues in education service delivery in Pakistan under changing
discourse towards uniformity and decentralization.
ii. Build new, productive synergies between research and policy-making to inform discourses
for future conceptualization and implementation of reforms.

Panel 1: Leveraging the Education Ecosystem

The aspiration for uniformity is grounded in the desire for implementation of article 25A; however,
any move towards standardization that does not account for the diversity existing in the system, is
unlikely to achieve desired goals. Uniformity therefore must go beyond simply one curriculum, one
language and/or one examination. Moderated by Dr. Faisal Bari, Associate Professor at LUMS, the
panel probes how and whether the interaction between the aspiration for uniformity and the reality
of diversity addresses the objective of equality of access and quality of education without producing
tensions across the disparate education systems in Pakistan. Questions and concerns produced in
the panel will be tackled in light of examples of positive (and negative) experiences regarding
uniform education systems in the global context. Lessons from around the globe could prove crucial
in providing valuable insight on how uniformity can be approached in the Pakistani context and
whether it can accommodate diversity prevailing in Pakistan’s educational ecosystem.
Panel 2: Decentralization, Local Government and Education
Substantive local government reform is a major manifesto commitment of the newly elected PTI
governments in Punjab, KP and Islamabad. This will be an important step towards operationalizing
Article 140-A of the Constitution of Pakistan, which aims to strengthen the federation by requiring
provinces to devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility and authority to the elected
representatives of the local governments. The panel will examine the question of "How to do
Education Delivery in Pakistan's Decentralizing Context?" That is, what is the appropriate assignment
of "the three Fs" of decentralization: functions, functionaries and finance across different tiers of
government? The aim is to work together to define a framework for decentralizing education that:
(1) unbundles education into constituent functions or activities and various jurisdictions for service
delivery, (2) adopts principles that can be used to assign the matrix of unbundled functions and
activities across the different jurisdictions and (3) suggests principles of financial devolution that will
be required to achieve an optimal assignment. We hope that this working session, moderated by Dr.
Ali Cheema (Associate Professor, LUMS) will give the provincial governments an actionable
framework that can be used as part of the local government reform exercise.

Future Direction
Pakistan and its federating units comprise one of the largest, most diverse and multi-tiered systems
of education service delivery. The task of governance is made more complex by deeply-rooted and
multidimensional inequities, across and within regions. This diversity and complexity challenges the
aspiration for uniformity of policy and provision. The policy roundtable will encourage future
policy making to acknowledge this diversity as a key element to determining inclusive formulation
and successful implementation of educational reforms in Pakistan. In connecting researchers,
practitioners and policy partners, it will present and then probe the scope for diversity under the
vision of a uniform and simultaneously decentralized education landscape. This policy roundtable
aims to develop policy-research collaborations in a way that will feed into all stages of the evidence-
to-policy chain to articulate and resolve issues in education through an effective and coherent
framework for reform.