Pakistan has a widespread state-maintained education system, running in parallel with an independent system of private schools which provide education to 37% of the school-age population. In the absence of full state provision, the ever-growing need for the services provided by schools has encouraged the growth of private provision, which has a variety of cost and quality of delivering the education service. Parents have a choice of selecting government or private school, which is in reality largely determined by their socioeconomic status. Private schools are popular as they provide supposedly better provision and quality of education and are therefore seen as the main contributors towards children’s academic achievement. There is a gradient in cost charged by the private sector which includes schools with very expensive monthly tuition fee) and as well as the schools with the lowest minimum monthly tuition fee. This study is a snapshot of school-level segregation in Pakistan, using the data from a nationally representative household survey and tests of children’s academic performance. The analysis includes 2,498 government and private schools and 28,000 children’s academic performance across the urban and rural regions of Pakistan. The findings are that segregation by academic performance is higher than segregation by poverty, and segregation by poverty is higher in the private sector compared to government schools, whereas segregation by performance is greater in government schools. The student intake to low cost private schools is often from the income groups that are on the borderline of poverty and possibly making a choice of private schools over the government schools. A regional level analysis shows that segregation levels in urban regions are higher in both school types compared to rural regions, and this is unusual in international terms. School education is a constitutional right of every citizen in Pakistan however there is no universal school provision or state laws that assures if children’s right to education are fully met. According to the official figure, 30 million children of school age have never been enrolled in schools and a large proportion of these children are from disadvantaged families or facing chronic poverty. Children who are not enrolled in schools are a segregated group who are the most disadvantaged and unfortunately not included in any school level analysis.

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