Research Report
Whose Voice Matters? Youth Agency in Determining and Learning the Skills that Matter in Pakistan's Public Secondary Schools
THEMES
Youth Agency & Engagement
Education Quality & Skills
Governance & Accountability
Right To Education
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This report asks how well Pakistan's education system creates opportunities for young people to shape what and how they learn. Drawing on a review of ten national and provincial education, skills and youth policies, a weighted survey of 767 Grade 10 students across all four provinces, the federal and regions (representing an estimated 1.31 million enrolled students), and 1,325 coded excerpts from interviews and focus groups with teachers, parents, head teachers and policymakers, it finds a consistent pattern the authors term the youth-agency paradox: a system that is comprehensively for young people and almost never with them. The report introduces two original analytical tools, the Youth-Agency Policy Assessment Framework (YA-PAF) and the Youth Agency Index (YAI), and sets out six recommendations framed around activating mechanisms that already exist rather than building new ones.
Key Highlights
Of ten policy instruments reviewed, the eight that govern teaching, training and budgets each score 1 out of 5 on youth agency; only the two stand-alone youth policies, genuinely co-designed with young people, reach 3 out of 5.
Students feel heard but are rarely heeded: 75.0% say adults listen to their ideas, yet only 49.7% report feedback ever changed a class or rule, and 84.3% say decisions about skills are controlled by adults.
Voice without choice: 57.3% get chances to say what they want to learn, but 57.4% can never choose the topics they work on and 87.3% find it hard to change pathway.
High self-reliance, low system support: 90.9% believe they can learn a difficult skill, but only 68.8% feel able to ask for help or resources.
Alignment falls with institutional distance: parents (83.1%), teachers (63.9%), school leaders (38.4%), peers (25.9%).
On the study's Youth Agency Index, young people's readiness (around 89 out of 100) far outruns the agency the system affords them (around 58 out of 100), an agency gap of roughly 31 points.