The roof of the Al-Khair school in Peshawar fell onto the classrooms below it shortly before 9 a.m. on Thursday, killing 32 students between the ages of seven and 14 and a female teacher. That was the toll Lady Reading Hospital’s spokesman, Muhammad Asim, gave Dawn by afternoon, revised up from 28.
It was at least the fourth deadly school roof collapse in Pakistan since May. The first three were all in Punjab, and Punjab changed its rules because of them.
Dawn’s account on Thursday listed those earlier deaths, and the AP’s noted one of them. Neither mentioned the fix: on July 18, Punjab stopped registering any private school that could not show a building fitness certificate from a civil engineer registered with the Pakistan Engineering Council.
We looked for the same rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province Peshawar is the capital of, and did not find one. Its answer came on Thursday, after the children reached the hospital, in the form of an audit.
Governor Faisal Karim Kundi wrote that he had ordered “a structural safety audit of educational institutions across the province” to “identify potential risks and ensure that immediate corrective measures are taken wherever necessary.” He added: “We cannot allow the safety of our children to be compromised.”
The year’s record says they already have been. We built this timeline from the local and wire reports on each collapse and on Punjab’s response:
| Date | Place | What happened | Dead |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 7 | Dera Ghazi Khan, Punjab | A private school’s classroom roof gives way under sand and bricks piled on it for construction work | 4 children |
| May 18 | Punjab | Provincial engineers propose mandatory building fitness certificates for private schools | None |
| June 30 | Kahna, Lahore | A tuition centre roof collapses during work on an unfinished second floor | 14 children |
| July | Baghbanpura, Lahore | The roof of an under-construction private school collapses | 1 child |
| July 18 | Punjab | No private school or tuition centre may register without an engineer’s fitness certificate | None |
| Oct. 15 | Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa | The Al-Khair school roof collapses; police cite an overloaded, weak structure | 32 children, 1 teacher |
Add it up: 4 + 14 + 1 + 32 is 51 children dead in four buildings across 161 days. Each collapse was reported, and each produced an arrest or an inquiry. One province changed what it takes to open a classroom, and the deadliest collapse of the year happened in a different one.
The details from Peshawar read like the details from Lahore. A rescue official told AFP that the roof of an upper floor gave way and crumpled the two storeys beneath it.
Peshawar’s police chief, Mian Saeed Ahmed, said the roof “was overweight with construction on a weak structure.” He was blunter with Arab News: “To sit children of three classes in such a congested alley and in such a fragile building, I believe there has been a huge negligence.”
The school’s owner was arrested within hours. That is necessary. It is also the cheapest thing a government can do, because it ends the story at one man.
Basic facts about the building are still unsettled. An injured teacher told the AP the school had an estimated 1,200 pupils from nursery through fifth grade. Al Jazeera put enrolment at about 350, and Daily Pakistan counted 110 to 120 children inside when the roof fell.
Nobody official has said which figure is right, or whether the provincial regulator had ever been inside the building. The same Daily Pakistan report says the provincial education secretary has asked the Private Schools Regulatory Authority for a report. It should be published in full.
Look at the mechanism and the collapses stop looking like bad luck. In Dera Ghazi Khan, sand and bricks for an expansion were piled on a classroom roof. In Kahna, the roof came down while work was under way on an unfinished second floor.
In Peshawar, the police chief is describing the same failure: weight added on top of a structure that was never built to carry it.
Our read of the incentive is simple. Adding a floor is cheaper than moving a school, and classes keep running underneath while the builders work, because a closed school collects no fees.
Punjab’s own engineers diagnosed this in May, before Kahna. Its Communication and Works Department warned in a letter that “a large number of private schools are operating from residential buildings, many of which were never approved for institutional use.” Six weeks later, 14 children died in Kahna. The certificate rule arrived 18 days after that.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has its own warning on file. In 2024, when a nursery roof fell on six children aged five and six in Swat, the Tribal News Network found that the owner had been paying the regulator a 10,000-rupee annual renewal fee, and the authority would not explain why substandard schools were left alone.
A regulator that collects the renewal fee and never looks at the ceiling is a cashier.
There is a political wrinkle, and it makes this simpler. On Sunday, Islamabad placed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa under emergency and governor’s rule, ordered the elected cabinet of Imran Khan’s party out of office and, on Monday, detained its chief minister, Sohail Afridi. The stated grounds were terrorism.
We think suspending an elected government across a whole province deserves every bit of the scrutiny it is getting. The PTI chairman, Gohar Ali Khan, asked why the whole province needs governor’s rule if the emergency is about 12 districts. It is a fair question.
The takeover does settle one thing. Kundi is no longer a ceremonial governor issuing condolences. He runs the province, so his audit is an order to his own administration, and he owns whatever it finds.
It needs a deadline, a published list of every school inspected and a rule that outlasts it. The rule already exists. Nothing in a security emergency stops his education department from issuing Punjab’s notification this week. We would go one step past Punjab: no classes in any room beneath active construction, and closure for a school that holds them.
Pakistan’s buildings have failed its children before this year. In August, 14 newborns died in an Islamabad hospital nursery fire that started in an air conditioner. Each time, accountability begins with whoever stood nearest.
It can climb higher. It took Italy nearly eight years, but a Genoa court sentenced the former chief executive of the motorway operator to 12 years for the bridge collapse that killed 43.
After Kahna in June, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif promised a “transparent, unbiased and immediate investigation.” On Thursday his deputy, Ishaq Dar, said he had taken “serious notice.”
The test of Kundi’s audit is simple: whether a private school in Peshawar needs an engineer’s signature before children walk in next month.