Soufia Siddiqi is Director Research at Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre(MHRC), and Assistant Professor at LUMS School of Education. She is a Rhodes Scholar and specializes in qualitative research methods as well as education policy and curriculum design. On the implementation side, she applies design ethnography, process mapping, and data to understanding what makes policy decisions tick (or not). Previously, Soufia was Technical Advisor to the School Education Department, Punjab and a member of the Punjab Examination Commission, where she led the Technical Committee for the province’s 2019 Assessment Policy Framework
During her time as Technical Advisor to the Secretary of School Education in the Punjab, Soufia worked on developing a 5-year roadmap for the province’s most urgent reform needs, paying special attention to the need for a coherent learning outcomes dataset as well as the political economy of teachers in the public education system. The latter is an area of research she is now probing in greater detail in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa context in conjunction with the RISE Programme Political Economy (Adoption) Team at the University of Pennsylvania. Soufia is also part of a 3-member team investigating the effects of different delivery models on systemic efficiencies for education in two of Pakistan’s largest provinces. Prior to this, Soufia led the Technical Committee at the Punjab Examination Commission to write the province’s first Assessment Policy Framework and also advised Alif Ailaan, Pakistan’s first education advocacy campaign. She is working on her first manuscript on notions of belonging amongst elite young men in public education in Pakistan.
