LAHORE: The Lahore’s public school system has fallen well short of its admissions target for the new session, with 187 government high schools across the district failing to fill the seats assigned to them. The District Education Authority has sought written explanations from the heads of all 187 institutions, according to details released on Tuesday.
The authority has directed the school heads to complete their allotted admission targets by 3pm on 1 September — a deadline measured in hours rather than weeks. The district’s enrolment campaign, run to bring out-of-school children into classrooms, did not deliver the numbers school administrations were expected to produce.
Available figures place Government High School Wassanpura furthest behind, with 232 fewer girls enrolled than its target. Government Girls High School Ghaziabad is short by 206 students and Government Girls Model High School Wahdat Colony by 201. Government High School Mominpura on Ravi Road is 162 students short, Government Girls High School Muhaddiya Data Nagar 160, and Government Girls High School Sanda Kalan 155.
The list continues across the city: Government Girls High School Township is 151 students short, Government APS Girls Model Town 149, Government School Gulshan-e-Ravi 141 and Government School Qila Lachman Singh 122.
The enrolment drive relies on school staff and area teams identifying children who are not attending any institution, persuading families to send them, and then registering them against a seat quota fixed for each school. In dense inner-city catchments the pool of genuinely out-of-school children is smaller than the quota assumes, while in newer peripheral settlements the schools are already oversubscribed — a mismatch that leaves individual heads carrying a target their locality cannot supply.
Heads of the affected schools have pushed back with a practical objection. Because every admission is verified against NADRA records, any attempt to log bogus students results in the record being rejected outright. Fake or inflated admissions simply cannot be entered to make the numbers add up, they argue — which leaves them answering for a shortfall they say reflects the catchment, not their effort.
The District Education Authority has been unambiguous about the consequences. School heads who fail to meet their admission targets within the stipulated time will face action under the PEEDA Act, the disciplinary law that governs Punjab’s public employees and can lead to penalties ranging from censure to removal from service.
Enrolment targets have become a central performance measure for Punjab’s school administration, tied to the province’s push to reduce the number of out-of-school children. The tension now visible in Lahore is between a target set centrally and the verified, NADRA-linked admission system that makes those targets impossible to fake. How the education authority resolves that tension will be watched closely by school heads across Lahore.
Leave a Reply