Analysis: The Certificate Was in Order, the Building Was Never Checked — Peshawar Has Exposed Pakistan’s School Safety System

On paper, the Al-Khair Education Centre in Peshawar’s Dir Colony was a properly approved school. It had been registered with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Private Schools Regulatory Authority in March this year, its name sat on the official list, and for the parents who sent their children there every morning, that was reassurance enough. Then, on Thursday, the roof of the three-storey building came down on the classrooms below and 35 people died, most of them children. The question Peshawar school safety now turns on is not whether the school had permission. It is who, at any point, actually looked at the building. The regulator’s own answer is the most damning document in the case.

Inspected — without anyone who could inspect

The authority’s managing director, Javed Iqbal, has said plainly that no technical personnel were present when the school was inspected. Registration, by his account, means counting classrooms and checking administrative requirements; judging foundations and the structural condition of a building was the job of construction experts who never came. What he said next matters even more. The authority has no team of its own for technical building inspections. It can fine a school housed in a dilapidated building, but it has no power to close one — and it cannot shut an unregistered school either. So the body whose certificate parents trust owns neither the tools to test a building nor the authority to empty one it believes is dangerous.

A third storey that should not have been there

Inamullah Khan of the Private School Association has put the blame on the principal and the regulator, and added a detail that widens the case: a three-storey school building, he says, was not even permitted in that area. Police describe the construction as poor; the owner has been arrested and the principal is in custody. Governor Faisal Karim Kundi has asked the obvious question — who issued the no-objection certificate? Yet the fact-finding committee announced after the collapse is chaired by Iqbal himself, the head of the authority that registered the school. An institution under question has been asked to write the answer, and that, more than any single lapse, is how the system protects itself.

Now every school will be inspected. How is the real test

The province has moved quickly since Thursday. District committees, this time with a Communications and Works representative on board, have been told to inspect every private school building and report within three days, grading each one safe, in need of repair, or unsafe. Structural inspections of government schools have been ordered separately, with district reports due by October 26. Nobody should doubt the urgency. But count the scale: thousands of buildings, a handful of days. If this round also ends as classroom counts and signatures, it will buy nothing but time until the next collapse. Three changes would make it real: no registration without a signed engineer’s report, buildings graded unsafe actually vacated rather than fined, and the findings published where parents can read them. Children across the province are still sitting in buildings whose files are complete. Peshawar has just shown, at the worst possible price, that a complete file was never the same thing as a safe school.