The Time Difference Between Pakistan and the UK

Four hours or five, decided by two Sundays

Pakistan Standard Time is UTC+5 and does not move. The country experimented with daylight saving briefly in the 2000s and dropped it. The UK runs on Greenwich Mean Time, UTC+0, through the winter and British Summer Time, UTC+1, through the summer. Subtract one from the other and the gap is five hours or four.

The switch happens on the last Sunday in March, when UK clocks go forward and the gap narrows to four, and on the last Sunday in October, when they go back and it widens to five. Those are the only two dates in the year on which a UK family needs to think about this at all.

The conversion, both seasons at once

Our weekday teaching block is 14:00–22:00 PKT, which is 09:00–17:00 GMT in winter and 10:00–18:00 BST in summer. Reading it from the British side is more useful, since that is the clock the child lives by.

Both seasons are given below on the same line, GMT first. Note how little of our day lands after a British school bell: everything above 15:00 GMT is happening while the pupil is still in a lesson somewhere else.

• 09:00 GMT / 10:00 BST = 14:00 PKT, our first class
• 12:00 GMT / 13:00 BST = 17:00 PKT
• 15:00 GMT / 16:00 BST = 20:00 PKT, the first genuinely after-school slot
• 16:00 GMT / 17:00 BST = 21:00 PKT, the most-booked UK hour
• 17:00 GMT / 18:00 BST = 22:00 PKT, the last class of our weekday
• Weekends: 05:00–15:00 GMT / 06:00–16:00 BST = 10:00–20:00 PKT

What this leaves for a school night

Most English secondary schools finish between 15:00 and 15:30, and our weekday block closes at 17:00 GMT. That leaves a usable window of roughly ninety minutes on a winter school night, stretching to about the same in summer once the walk home is counted. It is the tightest fit of any country we teach into except North America.

The practical consequence is that UK slots do not really exist at the times a family might first think of. There is no 19:00 lesson on a Tuesday, because 19:00 GMT is midnight in Lahore. The two hours that do exist, 15:30 to 17:00, are the two that fill first every September, and a family deciding in October is choosing from what is left.

The trap in late October

Take a family who booked 18:00 on a Wednesday in June. At the time, 18:00 BST was 22:00 in Pakistan, the last slot of our teaching day, and it worked. On the last Sunday in October the UK goes back to GMT while Pakistan stays put, so the same 18:00 becomes 23:00 PKT, an hour past the end of the day.

Nothing in the calendar entry changes and nothing looks wrong. The lesson simply falls off the far end of the timetable. Families on the last slot of the summer day have to move an hour earlier in British terms, to 17:00, and we write to them about it a fortnight beforehand rather than discovering it on the Monday.

In late March the same mechanism works in the family's favour. The gap narrows to four hours and every UK slot gets an hour of headroom back, which is why moving a class later in the evening is easy in April and impossible in November.

Weekends are where the real choice is

Our weekend hours, 10:00–20:00 PKT, are 05:00–15:00 GMT and 06:00–16:00 BST. The early part is unusable in Britain, but from about 09:00 GMT onwards a family has six hours to choose from rather than a single slot, and that is enough room for a two-hour session that a school night cannot hold.

For GCSE students in the spring term this is usually the answer. Full past papers take ninety minutes and cannot be crammed into a weekday window that closes at 17:00, so the paper is sat on a Saturday morning and the following weekday hour is spent on what it exposed.