Edition audit — is the corpus holding each board's *latest* books?

Commissioned to test whether the vintage gap between Punjab and the other two boards is an artefact of acquisition choices (i.e. we fetched old Sindh/KP books) or a real property of what those boards currently publish.

Answer: it is real. The corpus already holds the newest edition of every book in the matrix.

Sindh (STBB) — full portal inventory captured

All 10 class-listing pages scanned (classes VI–X, both pages); 114 books parsed, matching the raw card counts exactly. All 23 existing holdings reconcile exactly against the portal’s own listed medium and edition year — no recording errors.

Only four cells in the matrix have a newer edition — and all four are non-English

Every English-medium book we hold is already the newest English edition of that cell. The English-medium preference costs edition currency in five places — worst at Social Studies VI (six years behind the Sindhi edition) and Islamiyat VIII (five years behind the Urdu). This is a genuine trade-off created by the instruction to prefer English medium, and it is now documented rather than hidden.

Two cells have no English edition at all

• General Science VI — only Urdu (id 115) and Sindhi (id 122), both 2020-21.
• Pakistan Studies IX — only Urdu (id 183, 2020-21).

For a strictly English-medium vintage-matched comparison, these two cells cannot be filled from STBB at any price.

SNC adoption — a clear negative finding

Zero occurrences of curriculum, SNC, Single National Curriculum, National Curriculum or NCP across all 10 class listings, the portal homepage and 49 book-detail pages. The detail-page schema exposes exactly four fields — Class, Medium, Year, Format — and has no curriculum field at all. The newest labels are bare printing years (2026, 2025-26, 2024-25) with nothing tying them to NCP 2022/2023, and no title carries an “SNC”/“New Curriculum” marker of the kind KPTBB uses openly. Consistent with Sindh’s public refusal of the SNC.

Caveat, and it bounds the finding. This rests on the portal’s own metadata and titling rather than on a curriculum statement read from inside a PDF. The four candidate upgrade editions were never verified at the file level, so no preface was read for any of them.

That matters because a preface is the only evidence that would move this result from suggestive to conclusive. As it stands, the absence of any curriculum label across ten class listings, the portal homepage and 49 book-detail pages is consistent with Sindh’s public refusal of the Single National Curriculum — but it is an argument from the shape of a catalogue, not from the books.

KP (KPTBB) — rollout mapped, no upgrades exist

The SNC-era rollout stops at class 8, and covers only six subjects

Class 8 Urdu, Islamiat, History, Geography, Mathematics and Computer Science were approved by DCTE KP Abbottabad between 12-05-2022 and 16-07-2022, under NOC numbers literally carrying the string SNC-2022, printed for AY 2022-23. The Social Studies pair is copyrighted to National Book Foundation Islamabad — KP adopted federal NBF books rather than authoring its own; Urdu and Islamiat came from Afaq Publishers, Lahore. Four of the six are in our matrix and we hold all four.

Class 8 English and General Science were not modernised — both remain NC-2006, and no SNC variant of either exists on any mirror.

Classes 6, 7, 9 and 10 are entirely NC-2006, with hard imprint evidence

• History 6: “نصاب 2006ء”, letter dated 7 December 2010, AY 2021-22.
• Geography 7: “(قومی نصاب 2006ء)”, NOC F.1-18/2011-SSG dated 5 April 2011, AY 2020-21.
• Pakistan Studies 9: NC 2006, Federal Curriculum Wing letter F.6-8/2009-SSG dated 28-05-2010, “Printed for Academic Year 2024-25”.
• Class 9 sciences frozen at February 2018 DCTE NOCs (Biology 23-02-2018, Chemistry 15-02-2018).

The recent-looking year stamps are print runs, not editions. Biology 9 is a 2018 book reprinted for AY 2025-26; Pakistan Studies 9 is a 2010-approved book printed for AY 2024-25. This distinction matters for every vintage claim in the study and is now explicit.

Official sources yield nothing

tbb.kp.gov.pk and dcte.kp.gov.pk now serve the same generic KP-portal React bundle backed by mgn1.kp.gov.pk/api. Its downloads collection holds 120 items, none a textbook, curriculum, syllabus or price list. Domain-scoped variants 404. Both sites are unmigrated shells.

A mirror trap worth recording

perfect24u advertises “2022-23 Class 7 New Updated Books” — false. The files are the same NC-2006 books scanned as double-page spreads, and one class-7 English copy credits authors writing “according to the National Curriculum 2006”. That file is 32.7 MB with 101 pages while our complete copy is 21.3 MB with 195 pages: the mirror file is larger in bytes yet reports half the pages, because each PDF page holds two printed pages. File size and raw page count are both useless as completeness proxies without checking scan geometry.

Consequence for the analysis

The vintage gap is structural, not an acquisition artefact. Punjab cannot be vintage-matched against Sindh or KP in most subjects because the matching books do not exist:

• Sindh has not adopted the SNC at all, so no Sindh book is contemporaneous with Punjab’s SNC series.
• KP’s SNC adoption covers six subjects at one grade; everything else it prints is 2006-curriculum.

This strengthens rather than weakens the vintage-controlled findings reported in the synthesis §4. Where a matched pair does exist — Punjab vs KP class-8 History, and Punjab vs KP Pakistan Studies 9 — the provincial gap persists. Everywhere else, the honest statement is not “Punjab is more X than Sindh” but “Punjab’s current books are more X than the books Sindh and KP are currently printing”, which is the policy-relevant comparison anyway: it is what pupils actually receive this year.