Out-of-school Children Survey Report

The project is implemented by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and its partners, and it endeavors to achieve its goal through three distinct but interrelated components: improved classroom learning environment for reading, improved policies and systems for reading, and community-based support for reading in Pakistan. Socioeconomic barriers and low access to quality education prevent many children from enrolling in school or completing their education. To address this issue, the project focuses on bringing systematic improvements in the quality of education provided in schools, thereby improving access to education for out-of-school children. The project's out-of-school children enrollment survey is designed to collect year-wise information about out-of-school children enrolled or re-enrolled in all targeted public primary schools under the project receiving reading interventions. The survey was conducted in a sample of 367 schools drawn from the population of 8,066 PRP intervention schools. The sample is proportionally distributed among the provinces/regions with respect to their share in the total population and then further distributed among the districts proportionate to their schools (population) in that region. Simple random sampling technique was used to select schools in each district after sorting data as per school location (rural/urban) and school gender. Data collection was led by provincial/regional office M&E teams, with M&E assistants responsible for data collection and entry into an online database developed using Google forms. Student data was collected from attendance/admission registers in each sampled school as per the prescribed format. The data was examined for only new admissions, and students whose age was 7 years or more were reported in the grade-wise information section of the data collection tool. The data analysis revealed that a total of 3,900 out-of-school children were enrolled or re-enrolled in PRP intervention schools. Region-wise numbers of out-of-school children enrolled or re-enrolled in representative sample of schools are as follows: AJK (342 boys, 182 girls, 735 total), Balochistan (194 boys, 96 girls, 341 total), Gilgit-Baltistan (98 boys, 71 girls, 304 total), ICT (91 boys, 66 girls, 234 total), KP (570 boys, 387 girls, 2020 total), and Sindh (474 boys, 259 girls, 266 total). The average number of students enrolled per school was calculated as 4.8, with a range of 3.4 to 10.1 across the provinces/regions. The estimated number of out-of-school children newly enrolled or re-enrolled in PRP schools was estimated through multiplying the average students per school with the total number of PRP schools. Region-wise estimated numbers of newly enrolled children are as follows: AJK (3,151 boys, 3,584 girls, 6,735 total), Balochistan (2,385 boys, 2,434 girls, 4,819 total), Gilgit-Baltistan (1,579 boys, 1,600 girls, 2,179 total), ICT (1,540 boys, 583 girls, 2,123 total), KP (12,622 boys, 8,570 girls, 21,192 total), and Sindh (10,259 boys, 5,606 girls, 15,865 total).