Second Chances: How We’re Getting Pakistan’s Children Back Into the Classroom
Home About Us Causes Volunteer Blogs Contact Us Make Donation The Fort Foundation One Child, One Second Chance A boy joined one of our ALP classes near Islamabad last year. Twelve years old, never held a pencil properly in his life. He’d spent the years other kids spend in primary school working alongside his father instead. By the time his family found us, he’d more or less accepted that school wasn’t something that happened to boys like him. Six months later he was reading full sentences on his own, and our instructor still brings up the day he read a whole page out loud without stopping once. That’s the kind of story people usually picture when they hear about our education work. But ALP is only one part of it, and honestly it’s the smaller part in terms of how many children we actually reach. Pakistan’s Out-of-School Children: A Problem That Can’t Be Ignored Pakistan’s out-of-school rate, per the government’s own Household Integrated Economic Survey released this past January, sits at 28 percent. More than one in four school-age children. Some groups, Save the Children among them, think the real figure is higher once you count kids who are enrolled on paper but barely show up. Either way, we’re talking about millions of children, and most of them aren’t behind because they can’t learn. They’re behind because something in their life made school impossible and nobody stepped in. We try to step in at three different points. 1. Running Schools Where Children Need Them We run our own schools. Actual schools, our own teachers, our own buildings, in places where families either had no school nearby or couldn’t get their kids into one that existed. A child in one of our schools doesn’t need catching up. They’re just in class, same as any other student. 2. Supporting Children at Risk of Dropping Out We also support children who are already enrolled somewhere else, government schools mostly, but who are close to dropping out. This is the least visible part of what we do and probably the least exciting to write about. It’s paying a uniform bill. Covering exam fees for a student whose family can’t manage it that term. Tutoring a kid who’s falling behind badly enough that the family is starting to talk about pulling them out. None of that makes for a great story, but it’s usually the difference between a child staying enrolled and a child just disappearing from the register one term without anyone officially deciding anything. 3. Accelerated Learning for Children Who Have Left School And then there’s ALP, for children the system has already lost. Kids who are too old for their grade, who never enrolled, or who dropped out years back and can’t realistically walk into a normal classroom at this point. ALP compresses years of missed learning into a much shorter stretch, taught by instructors who work specifically with older beginners, so a child can either move into mainstream school or go toward vocational training afterward. How Our Three Education Programs Work Together These aren’t three separate charities running under one name. A child getting fee support today is a child we’re keeping out of the ALP category tomorrow. A child who catches up through ALP often ends up back in one of our schools, or a government one, finishing out their education normally. The three approaches are connected. Keeping children enrolled, helping them catch up, and providing a route back into education are all parts of the same goal. The Hidden Cost of Staying in School The fee support side sounds simple on paper but it rarely is in practice. Families don’t usually come to us saying “we can’t afford school.” Most of the time it comes up sideways, a teacher mentions a student hasn’t paid exam fees in two months, or a mother mentions it once during a home visit and then changes the subject. Our field staff have learned to listen for that rather than wait for someone to ask directly, because by the time a family actually asks, the child has often already missed enough school that catching back up is hard. A lot of this work is just paying attention before the problem becomes a dropout statistic instead of a fixable one. More Than 7,000 Children Reached Put together, our schools, our support for kids already enrolled elsewhere, and ALP, we’ve reached more than 7,000 children. That number has never just been about ALP. If we only ever talked about the dramatic catch-up stories, we’d be leaving out most of what actually keeps a child in school, which is usually something unglamorous like a paid exam fee showing up at the right moment. Every one of those 7,000 is an actual kid, and usually a family whose situation shifted because of it. A child who learns to read ends up teaching a younger sibling at home half the time. A girl who stays in school because a scholarship covered this year’s fees is a girl who wasn’t married off at fifteen instead. Education gets the biggest share of our program budget of any of our six focus areas, and this is why. Progress Has Been Made, But the Need Remains The national numbers have gotten a bit better over the last year or two, which is real progress. But 28 percent is still millions of kids who have no way to fix their own situation. They can’t ask for a school to be built closer to home. They can’t vote on an education budget. Mostly they just wait and hope some adult decides they’re worth the trouble. Working Alongside Pakistan’s Public Schools We don’t think of any of this as a substitute for public schools, which are and should stay the backbone of education here. We’re filling gaps around the edges: running schools where there’s a real shortage, catching kids before they drop out, and picking up the ones who already have. None of