At least thirty children, most of them younger than thirteen, and one teacher were killed in Peshawar yesterday when the roof of the Al Khair private school came down on them during morning classes, and dozens more were pulled from the rubble injured, some of them critically. These were pupils who had walked into school expecting an ordinary day of lessons, and while rescue workers dug through the debris for hours, their parents stood outside waiting to learn whether they would take home a child or a coffin. The police say the building was structurally weak and that its roof had been loaded with additional construction it was never meant to carry, the owner has been arrested, and an inquiry has begun, but none of this will bring back a single child, and none of it answers the question of why such a building was allowed to hold a classroom at all.
What makes the tragedy harder to accept is that it is the latest entry in a list that has been growing for three years. In July 2024 students were injured in one collapse, and a month later twelve were hurt in another. In June 2025 several children’s were killed in Multan. In February this year a child died in Sialkot, in May four were killed and twenty injured in Dera Ghazi Khan, and in June fourteen children died when a tuition centre roof fell in Lahore’s Kahna area, with three more deaths in Umerkot the same month. A child was killed days later in Lahore’s Baghbanpura, and in September one person died in Muzaffargarh while five were killed in Sindh. A country that has watched this pattern repeat in every province cannot plausibly describe Peshawar as an accident.
The cause is not hard to find, because across Pakistan houses are routinely converted into schools and tuition centres, with extra floors, makeshift rooms and heavier roofs added by owners who answer to no engineer and fear no inspector. Registration, which ought to certify that a building is fit for hundreds of children, has been reduced to paperwork, and the Peshawar case shows it plainly, since the provincial regulator says Al Khair was registered only in March, yet no technical personnel took part in the inspection. If a school can be certified without anyone examining its beams and walls, then the certificate protects the owner and the regulator and offers nothing to the child sitting beneath the ceiling.
The government’s first duty, therefore, is to inspect, and the committees formed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to examine private school buildings are a welcome start, provided their reports are published, dangerous premises are closed at once, and no school is allowed to reopen without clearance from an independent structural engineer. Every other province must do the same, and the exercise must cover tuition center’s, academies, madrassas and any school operating inside a residential property, because the Lahore and Peshawar disasters both occurred in precisely such places. Building permission, school registration and annual safety certification should be linked into a single system, with named, qualified inspectors who can be held personally answerable when they sign off on a death trap.
Private owners and school administrations carry their share of the responsibility as well, for no one is better placed than a headteacher to notice cracks, seepage or a sagging roof, and each should be required to report them in writing and to stop using any unsafe room until it is repaired. Owners who make dangerous alterations must face prosecution, not a fine they can treat as a business expense, and officials who neglected their duties deserve the same treatment, since a regulator that looks away is as guilty as the landlord who builds the extra floor.
Thirty children went to school in Peshawar and did not come home. The owner’s arrest and the promised inquiry are the easy part, because Pakistan has seen both before; what has always been missing is the harder work of inspecting buildings, closing unsafe ones and punishing those, in school offices and regulators’ chairs alike, who looked away. If this tragedy ends in condolences and committees, the next roof is already waiting to fall, and the parents who bury their children then will be right to ask why nothing changed after Peshawar.
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