Be it the private sector or the public, experts point out two major flaws that limit improvements in education standards.

Household involvement: Most government teachers and officials adopt the rhetoric that with illiterate and ignorant parents who cannot distinguish between good schools and bad, education cannot improve.

“The roadmap does not take parents into account and remains top down instead of bottom up,” pointed out one education expert.

Similar attitudes can be found in private schools. But Prof Andrabi and others’ research has found that parents very much have the ability to accurately distinguish between good schools and bad. “This is not true at all, we have lot of education awareness and everyone wants to educate their kids,” he stated. So parents have to be made an important part of the equation for transformation in education to take place.

Teachers: “We all accept that teachers are the basic unit of an education system,” said Mr Rasheed, but pointed out that nowhere in the education sector, be it public or private, have they been prioritized in the right manner.

“Teacher training depends on the quality of training and can only go so far. But no one mentions the very colleges that are preparing the teachers. Do they have a strong foundation in general education to be able to benefit from teacher training?” he asked.