The Senate of Pakistan has passed the Free and Compulsory Education Amendment Bill 2026, making computer science and coding compulsory subjects in schools from the elementary to high school level across the country. The bill was presented during a Senate session chaired by Senator Sherry Rehman and represents a significant shift in Pakistan’s national education policy, formally integrating digital literacy and programming skills into the curriculum that every school-going child in the country will be required to study. The amended law came into immediate effect following Senate approval, signalling the urgency with which lawmakers view the need to modernize Pakistan’s education system in line with the demands of a technology-driven global economy.
The amendment builds on the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2012, expanding its scope to include programming and computer education as core compulsory subjects alongside existing foundational disciplines. Lawmakers who spoke in favor of the bill argued that the move would help prepare Pakistani students for the global job market at a time when technology skills have become a prerequisite for participation in modern economies, and that building coding literacy from an early age would give the country’s youth a stronger foundation for careers in software, engineering, data science, and the broader digital sector.
The bill’s passage comes at a moment when Pakistan is simultaneously pursuing several parallel digital skills initiatives at the post-secondary level, including the PSEB SkillBridge apprenticeship program, the AI Seekho initiative, and the national IT Industry Census, making the compulsory introduction of computer science at the school level a foundational piece of a much larger national digital workforce development strategy. By anchoring technology education within the Right to Free and Compulsory Education framework, the government is ensuring that access to computer science learning is treated not as an optional enrichment activity but as a fundamental right extended to every child regardless of the school they attend or the province they live in.
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