Pakistan has declared education an emergency. The coming budget will show whether the state meant it. The federal budget process for FY2026–27 is already underway. The Finance Division’s Budget Call Circular, issued on Jan 27, 2026, asks ministries and divisions to submit FY2024–25 actuals, FY2025–26 revised estimates, and FY2026–27 budget estimates. In other words, the next budget is now being shaped. This is where Pakistan’s education emergency will either become a governing priority or remain a public performance.
The emergency is not rhetorical. UNICEF Pakistan notes that more than 26 million school-age children are out of school, over 10 per cent of all out-of-school children globally, although Pakistan has only around three per cent of the world’s population. It also notes that 77pc of children cannot read and understand a simple text by the age of 10. (UNICEF)
Yet the public purse tells another story. The Pakistan Economic Survey 2024–25 states that cumulative education expenditure by federal and provincial governments in FY2025, from July to March, was estimated at 0.8pc of GDP. It also records that education-related expenditure decreased by 29.4pc, falling to Rs899.6bn from Rs1, 251.06bn.
An emergency funded at less than one per cent of GDP is not an emergency response. It is a contradiction written into the budget. The usual defence is fiscal constraint. Pakistan is indebted, undertaxed, and under pressure from external financing needs. This is true. The Federal Budget in Brief 2025–26 places interest payments at Rs8,207bn and defence affairs and services at Rs2,550bn, against total expenditure of Rs17,573bn. No serious education argument can pretend that the state has unlimited room to spend. But fiscal pressure does not erase political choice. It reveals it. Even in difficult budgets, some commitments are protected, some expanded, and some deferred. Education is too often deferred. This is the deeper failure. Pakistan not only spends too little on education. It spends heavily on the consequences of not educating its people.
It spends on poverty management, but not enough on the institutions that could reduce inherited poverty. BISP and other forms of social protection are necessary. In a country where inflation and insecurity have weakened household survival, cash support is not a luxury. But cash transfers cannot repair classrooms, prepare teachers, teach children to read, keep adolescent girls in school, strengthen colleges, or sustain universities. If relief expands while education weakens, the state becomes better at cushioning deprivation than ending it.
It spends on security, but underinvests in the social foundations of security. A country with millions of children outside school and millions more inside classrooms without learning cannot build durable stability through force alone. Illiteracy, exclusion, unemployment, and institutional mistrust are not soft problems. They are slow-burning national risks.
It speaks of economic transformation, but neglects the system that produces human capability. Pakistan wants IT exports, artificial intelligence, skilled labour, entrepreneurship, and innovation. These ambitions sound modern. The educational base beneath them does not. A digital economy cannot be built on weak schools, under-resourced colleges, and universities struggling for basic research capacity. This is why the FY2026–27 budget matters. It will show whether the education emergency was a governing commitment or a communicative gesture. A serious budget should not be judged only by a nominal increase. Inflation can turn increases into illusions. Salary pressures can absorb entire allocations. Development funds can be announced and later squeezed. The real test is whether the state begins to change the structure of education financing. There are three tests.
First, the budget must set a credible multi-year path for education spending. Pakistan cannot repair decades of neglect in one fiscal year. But it can stop moving in the wrong direction. It can commit to staged increases, protect them from inflationary erosion, and report progress publicly each year. Second, the budget must protect learning-related investment. Salaries matter, and teachers must be paid. But recurrent expenditure alone cannot transform classrooms. The crisis is not only that children are out of school. It is also that many who enter school do not learn enough. Money must reach teacher preparation, foundational literacy and numeracy, school facilities, girls’ retention, digital access, college improvement, and university research. Third, money must be tied to public accountability. Pakistan’s education debate often swings between two incomplete positions that spend more, or blame governance. The country needs both financing and accountability. Provinces and institutions should be judged against visible benchmarks like enrolment, retention, teacher attendance, learning outcomes, transition to secondary education, gender gaps, and support for disadvantaged districts. Budgets should not disappear into systems that cannot show what changed.
This also requires a more intelligent link between social protection and schooling. A family protected from hunger today should not be abandoned to illiteracy tomorrow. Cash support should help keep children, especially girls and the poorest children, in education. Relief and human development should not operate as separate bureaucratic worlds.
Higher education must also return to the national conversation. Pakistan often treats universities as an elite concern, but they are part of state capacity. They train teachers, doctors, engineers, administrators, researchers, and policymakers. A country that weakens its universities weakens its ability to govern, innovate, and solve problems.
The central issue, then, is not whether Pakistan values education in principle. Almost every leader says so. The issue is whether education can survive the budget table, where slogans meet competing claims and political courage is measured in rupees. For too long, education has been treated as a promise to the future. That is precisely the problem. The future does not vote in budget meetings. Children outside school do not lobby. Weak public universities do not command the urgency of debt repayments or security shocks. So the crisis persists, familiar enough to be acknowledged, but not powerful enough to reorder priorities. That is what the FY2026–27 budget can change, or confirm. If education again appears as a residual item after debt, defence, administration, subsidies, and short-term political needs, the message will be clear. Pakistan will have chosen to manage the fallout of educational failure rather than confront its causes.
Budgets reveal what speeches conceal. The next one will tell us whether Pakistan’s education emergency has become policy, or whether it was only another performance of concern.
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Saqib Raza is an education policy scholar and writer working at the intersection of higher education, governance, equity, and reform. His research has been published in international journals and presented at international conferences, while his policy writing has appeared on international platforms.
