hat do you want to be when you grow up?” “A teacher,” is still a favourite response for at least a third in any class. The profession is a symbol of agency, status, care and learning transformation. According to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2023-24, there are 1.7 million registered teachers in Pakistan from early years to tertiary education. Accounting for the number of unregistered teachers, the total figure can be estimated to be around 2 million. The year 2024 in Pakistan has witnessed a plethora of quality education reports highlighting trends, rankings and major challenges in the education sector. These are data driven evidence-based documents, democratising the fundamental right to information (Article 19- A) for citizens, politicians, decisionmakers alike about the state of education in Pakistan, accountable to both Article 25-A as a fundamental constitutional right to education and to SDG 4 goal and targets pledged nationally and globally.

The powerful data sheds light on the total number of children (girls and boys) accessing education facilities and those unable to; the state of these facilities, functionality and inclusivity; who learns and who does not by geography, gender and wealth; how many teachers by gender are available for what level of education against posts approved by the system; number of single- or two-teacher multi-grade schools; how many teachers attend schools; what is the level of their general and professional education; trainings received in a given year etc. There have been monthly launch and dissemination of government and non-government reports including the 7th Population and Housing Census Report 2023, providing layers of nuanced evidence to the household level on what needs to be done to get 25 million out-of-school children in school and, more importantly, to ensure that those in school learn and persist for 12 years.

To make schooling and learning happen together, the teacher remains the pivotal catalytical force. They are visualised predominantly in a typical classroom with a black or white board, with lots of children, teaching from the official or prescribed textbooks racing to finish the syllabus for which they have been hired by the government or non-government private managers and owners. In all events, the teacher appears as a lone ranger delivering learning in varied local contexts. In this classical rendition of a typical school, classrooms and teachers teaching prescribed texts, they are dystopian figures delivering ‘learning’ in the periods for given subjects as per the allotted timetables.

The data regime in 2024 conjures caricatures of a teacher in a poorly performing system, strapped of resources challenged by a ‘missing third’ and learning-poor children of Pakistan. But teachers, and teaching, deserve depictions through a more contemporary lens combining both human capital (education) and social capital (relationships/ experiences for a purpose) approaches. Here, a teacher with 10-16 years or even 20 years of education (matriculation to PhD) brings her/ his own experience, or combines dynamic social capital accumulation from peers and community for the children in classrooms. Suddenly, the child sitting in the outer learning layer of a teacher-centric circle shifts to the inner central space where the teacher and other actors support the child’s learning experiences. A great teacher, and there are many in Pakistan, enhances her/ his performance through such a collective group approach for learning solutions, complex challenges and recurrent emergencies. Suddenly, the isolated classroom or the learning space created by the teacher and supported by enablers becomes populated with students, colleagues, parents, grandparents and mentors/ coaches who make a lesson come alive in local contexts co-creating learning for life.

We salute our teachers who go unrecognised for their ingenuity in acknowledging the child and the community as creators of sustained learning. Sister Zeph is one such exemplary winner of the Global Teacher Prize 2023 from Gujranwala, symbolic of many others. 

Such a shift in recognising routine innovations makes the ossified industrial-age ‘factory model’ of learning-teaching of a lonely teacher part of a wider collective creating dynamic spaces of learning in resource strapped contexts. This shift has always happened across times for sustained resilient learning. Catalytic teachers have always been bold and subversive, especially in tough contexts combining human and social capital, reimagining and repositioning the centrality of the child supported by multiple actors to break their isolation. Today, teachers are being supported through multiple bold initiatives in Pakistan accelerated by possibilities unleashed, which I call the Covid-19 dividends; that not only shocked the system but also leapfrogged options for ed tech for teachers, students and parents/ caregivers alike. The social distance cure from the pandemic imploded with bridging / fusing human and social capital to expand and acknowledge the dynamics of the ‘learning teams’ approach (see Workforce Transformation/ Learning Generation Initiative 2024). The parents/ caregivers and teachers joined hands to mitigate learning losses.

A child always learns naturally in multiple spaces—at home, the community, the school/ classroom, never in a closed but open system, absorbing positive and negative experiences building reservoirs of knowledge and resilience. Good teachers build upon that reality blurring the classroom, school, home and community boundaries; outsiders become insiders in open learning accountable systems with frequent feedback loops for action and correction. We salute our teachers who go unrecognised for their ingenuity in acknowledging the child and the community as creators of sustained learning. Sister Zeph is one such exemplary winner of the Global Teacher Prize 2023 from Gujranwala, symbolic of many others.

Recent initiatives for expanded learning teams in Pakistan endorsed by the government that resonate with similar trends globally include:

• Hiring of coaches/ mentors in Gilgit Baltistan, ICT, Sindh (SEF) for accelerating technology, coding, STEM and enterprise skills from the open market, Teach for Pakistan, NIETE, NUST, LUMS, AKU-IED, Knowledge Platform etc as extended teaching-learning teams.
• Placing fellows/ coaches in government schools by Teach for Pakistan and ITA to support teachers in teaching-learning processes, reading hour and interactive libraries.
• Repositioning/ training assistant education/ field officers closest to schools as cluster support mentors and instructors for teachers.
• Mobilising teachers for STEM-Tech clubs in schools through training and cluster support by PAMS/ Science Fuse, Oxbridge etc.
• Hiring teaching assistants for ECE through school-based non-salary budgets in the Punjab.
• Accelerated teaching at the right level for foundational learning and catch up programmes like Siyani Sahelian and GOAL through government teachers and/ or volunteers and teacher assistants from communities by TALEEM/ ITA/ VSO/ British Council.
• School teachers supported by tutors for phone-based tutoring (ITA/ Taleemabad).
• Mobilising teachers for academic and non-academic domains from ECE to secondary to address learning, climate change challenges through positive mind sets; deploying assess, innovate and showcase design methods under Schools 2030 in government schools of GB and KP.
• Promoting life skills through sports and games by mobilising partners in government schools to enable teachers to mainstream learning beyond textbooks Right to Play/ others.
• Public-private partnerships in government schools for value addition in learning, governance, school improvement, stabilisation, tech and AI, STEM, libraries and reading.

Examples of positive enablers for teachers in public sector and low-cost publicly financed schools are a landscape of possibilities for deploying the value of expanded learning teams in schools. Our classrooms do not have to be learning poor with an isolated teacher; they are coming alive with expanded practices of ‘learning teams’ combining human and social capital through formal bridging partnerships. For systems transformation these shifts must be recognised and scaled to replace a lonely underperforming teacher in complex times.

The writer is the CEO of Idara-i-Taleem-o-Aagahi. She is a founder of the Pakistan Learning Festival and a global champion of the Learning Generation Initiative. She is a finalist of the Asia Education Medal 2024