Quaid’s School – Newspaper

LONG before he became the Quaid-i-Azam we know, Mahomedali must have been 16 years old when he briefly attended the Church Mission School. Founded in 1845 in the heart of Karachi, CMS must have been a premier educational institution then, attracting the brightest minds from the subcontinent, including the young Jinnah.

When the school was nationalized in 1972, as with the post-colonial demise of several other institutions, the character and service of the school shrank. By 2014, the school had a mere 70 students, was barely functional, and the mafia had set its sights on its valuable buildings. Fast forward another 10 years and the school has made a dramatic comeback with an episode of regrowth and transformation. Today, the school provides education to over 2,700 students. How did this happen? And more importantly, what lessons does it offer to education reformers in Pakistan?

It all started with a random visit from a former student. Meraj Nazar, a retired engineer living in California, was visiting family in Pakistan when he remembered to stop by the school where he had spent his childhood. Shocked by the dire state the school had fallen into, he contacted his former classmates and called for a collective effort. As if everyone had been waiting for this call, a group of influential businessmen, government officials and IT professionals who had left the public education system decades ago were suddenly back with a commitment to help their alma mater, its teachers and, most importantly, its students.

This story had another hero, one within the system: a visionary principal, Imtiaz Ali Bughio, who facilitated this collaboration between the school and alumni. Today, CMS has removed the mountain of garbage in its backyard and built a butterfly garden in its place. It provides new students with stationery sets, provides them with a computer room and a science lab, organizes free medical camps, and offers free coaching in English and sports.

CMS provides valuable insights for improving education.

Like CMS, there are 174,096 government schools in Pakistan, but all but a few are poorly funded. Despite international commitments to spend at least four percent of GDP on education, the federal and provincial governments together spend only 1.7 percent, and even this share could shrink due to ongoing economic challenges.

Despite the gradual decline of the public sector, the majority—53.5 percent—of school-age children in Pakistan attend public schools, and the 29 million children who attend these schools are unlikely to find any other source of formal education. The private sector is expanding, especially in urban areas, but even the wide variety of elite and low-cost private schools have failed to cover the 26 million children who are left out of the education system. In short, there is no alternative to improving the quality of education provided in Pakistan’s public schools, which are the only source of formal education for the majority of school-age children across the country.

So far, school management committees are the furthest we have explored in community engagement. But SMCs are limited in scope and capacity, as they only allow parents and teachers to spend very inadequate funds. With the continued departure of the influential class, those in the public education system have little power to implement reforms.

One resource—important and untapped—is school alumni and other community philanthropists, including expatriate Pakistanis. This resourceful stakeholder has effectively left the public education system, but the system desperately needs their voice. At little cost, alumni and volunteers from broader communities can be brought back into the stakeholder arena of the education system and contribute significantly to not only equipping schools with better learning resources, but also providing soft skills, conducting career guidance and motivational sessions, facilitating health awareness, organizing English language and computer courses, and resolving local conflicts between schools and communities.

As in the CMS case study, passionate alumni, philanthropists and community volunteers can bring about major transformation. However, to scale such models of public-private partnerships, alumni engagement needs to be facilitated in schools. To begin with, this experiment should be piloted in the oldest and most historic 500 schools across the country, whose alumni are professionally outstanding and hold influential positions within and outside the country. They want to knock on the doors of their classrooms again, but education departments need to ensure that they are well received. With its proven success, this model of collaboration between alumni and school leaders is what Quaid’s school has to offer to other schools in Jinnah’s Pakistan.

The writer is a development professional.

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Published in Dawn, August 10, 2024