Behind every “A* guaranteed” flyer is a system profiting off parental anxiety and academic pressure. Aneeqa Imran unpacks how tuition centres and coaching culture have transformed education into a marketplace.
When I was five, my school teacher took my mother aside after class. She seemed concerned as I was reversing letters and struggling to write in a straight line. ‘It might be dyslexia,’ the teacher offered, a diagnosis gently. She recommended that I begin extra help immediately, ideally with her.
And so began my first encounter with tuition – not as a supplement, but as a prescription. I would sit in the same classroom, with the same teacher, but this time the learning came at a cost, and with a different kind of attention. I didn’t know what dyslexia was, only knew that what I was learning in a classroom was not enough, even if the person teaching was the same.
In our house, the moment passed quietly but left something lasting: the idea that real learning begins after school. Later, my mother realised the real diagnosis was just a five-year-old’s handwriting. The worry disappeared. But the tuition, once urgent had now became a habit, reshaping how we understood education and its anxieties.
It was easier to keep going than to unlearn that classrooms alone were not enough. And in Pakistan, this notion was institutional. Students run on autopilot: school all day, quick meals at home, uniform off, then straight to tuition. Another stuffy, windowless room. Same lessons, taught twice. No pause, just a cycle of rinse, repeat, relearn.
The narrative is simple: school is not enough, tuition is. Learning now lives in this in-between space, not in the classroom, nor at home, but somewhere in the paid hours after school.
Across Pakistan, education has two faces. There is the official one, the school. Then there is coaching centres, test prep classes, “paper prediction” WhatsApp groups, and a cottage industry of consultants who promise not just grades but futures. What was once meant to reinforce learning has evolved into a kind of parallel system. You go to school to mark attendance. You go to tuition to learn.
The country’s coaching economy did not emerge from nowhere. State-run education created this void as overburdened schools, underqualified and poorly trained educators, volatile curricula, and exams that reward precision over curiosity steadily eroded its quality.
And, as voids inevitably do, it drew in an expanding private schooling sector operating without adequate regulation, along with entrepreneurs, counsellors, and an entire workforce of teachers who earn more through private tutoring than they do inside the classroom. These players form what scholars increasingly refer to as Pakistan’s shadow education industry. But “shadow” might be a misnomer. There is nothing particularly hidden about it.
You see, they openly market: “Guaranteed A*s,” “Topical Papers and Paper Leaks.” Education here is not so much about knowledge as it is about access.
Access to the “real notes,” the unspoken tricks of the trade. It is not difficult to see why families invest. And until platforms like the Common App and Khan Academy remain underutilised, the perception that access to opportunity is for sale will keep growing.
A study by LUMS researchers Bisma Khan and Sahar Shaikh finds that one in three private-school students in Punjab now seeks additional coaching outside the classroom. In cities, that number is likely much higher. For most families, it is less a luxury than a hedge against failure, and the emotional and economic consequences are stark.
A Gomal University study documented how many families borrow, sacrifice savings, or reduce basic expenditures to fund coaching. Children lose sleep, develop anxiety, and lose sight of why they are learning in the first place. That is the cost; not of education, but of an ecosystem that sells it for grades, not growth.
This ecosystem is not necessarily driven by cynicism. It is sustained by anxiety, by the belief that without these add-ons, children will fall behind. Teachers, often underpaid and overworked, turn to private tuition as a second income.
In theory, nothing unethical. Practically, it can distort the classroom. A lesson might feel rushed or unclear, only to be delivered in full during a hourly paid session later that evening. Notes, explanations, and exam strategies are reserved for students who can afford the extras.
The culture of exam prediction deepens this divide. Guess papers, circulated through WhatsApp groups, are an insider currency. Students no longer study to understand, but to anticipate. If success hinges on cracking the exam code rather than mastering the subject, who can fault them for trying to stay one step ahead?
None of this, of course, is officially endorsed. But it is tolerated.
Nixor College in Karachi did what most institutions do not: it banned private tuition, not symbolically, but structurally. The school introduced an academic support system during regular hours, where teaching assistants held sessions to help students revisit concepts, ask questions, and engage meaningfully with their teachers.
The goal wasn’t just academic proficiency, but a fuller education, one that nurtures curiosity, encourages critical thinking, and balances learning with social responsibility. As a private institution, Nixor is an exception. It carries a degree of privilege, but exceptions matter, because they show us possibility.
Our public schools should make meaningful changes. It starts with clarity over cramming, and should reward understanding, not memorisation. Career counselling should be built into schools, not outsourced to expensive consultants.
It means paying teachers a living wage, so they do not have to split themselves between the classroom and the drawing room. Simply put, it is about building an education system that makes coaching centres unnecessary and gives every student a fair chance to grow and succeed.
The real challenge is not shutting these centres down, but making them irrelevant—by shaping a generation driven by curiosity and character, not just grades. Education will always carry tension, between ambition and pressure. Performance and growth. Parents will often slip into the grades crisis. But many of the supposed red flags, like a child reversing letters, are simply the messiness of learning.
The answer lies somewhere in the middle, where learning is slower, quieter, and more honest. Not packaged and sold, draining families and planting doubt, but built on trust between students, teachers, families and schools. Within children themselves. Tuition centres may thrive now, but they should not define the future. The goal is not to shut them down, but to create classrooms that make them unnecessary.
Until then, children like me, bright, worried, flipping letters, will keep being told to catch up. Not because they are behind. But because someone is ready to sell them the idea that they are.
