Ashfaque, a retired EDO and an ex-head teacher, still recalls his long battle at the Punjab courts, lasting for two years from 1999 to 2001, with vivid details and strong emotions. He was one of the many head teachers who were retired from service...

The federal government has taken the easy route of levying higher taxes on those who are already in the tax net without targeting those high-income earners who under-report their incomes or manage to remain outside the income tax net. This policy of squeezing taxpayers...

By and large, the quality of education in Pakistan is poor. But it is not uniformly poor. Some schools are worse than others. If we were to think of the school education system as a pyramid with a few elite schools (public as well...

These days education research is increasingly becoming coincident with policy research. In fact, a reviewer’s comments on one of the papers I co-authored went like this: It did not deserve to be published because it was not policy relevant. Upshot: It was bad research...

Today, children enter the education system at the age of just two and a half; by 16, many are undertaking more than ten ‘A’ levels when the minimum requirement is only three. It is not surprising therefore, that teaching time has also spread outside...