Abstract:
Providing secondary education to all the children up to 15 years of age is constitutional responsibility of the government that also included in the National Development Goals. It essentially requires full enrollment and completion rates of all School-going age children. Ironically, a large number of children are out of school in Pakistan. This study examines the issue of out of school children (OOSC) in rural Pakistan and identifies the factors relevant to the issue. The study estimated the determinants of OOSC and figure out which of those are significant. The qualitative exploratory part of the study evaluates the consecutive educational policies and initiatives from 1947 to 2018 that aimed to increase the literacy rate in the country. Finding of the study may be helpful in designing public education policy and optimal allocation of limited government resources on education. The empirical part uses cross-sectional survey data from Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), 2016 and employed the logistic regression analysis. The empirical model identifies the supply-side and the demand-side factors for low retention rates and high levels of dropouts. Supply-side factors include the teaching resources and school facilities, while the demand-side factors involve parents’ education, and child characteristics. The most significant factors are found to be the parents’ education, gender of the child, family wealth, teacher quality and the availability of water and toilets in the school. The study concludes that an appropriate policy should be one that integrates both the demand and supply-side factors of education to combat the menace of large number of OOSC in the country.
