Access To Education

Key Facts & Figures on Access to Education

Today, education remains an inaccessible right for millions of children around the world.
As a result of poverty and marginalization, more than 72 million children around the world remain unschooled.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected area with over 32 million children of primary school age remaining uneducated. In Central and Eastern Asia, as well as the Pacific, there are more than 27 million uneducated children.
Of the world’s 787 million children of primary school age, 8% do not go to school. That’s 58.4 million children. (UNESCO, 2019)
Over 600 million children and adolescents worldwide are unable to attain minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics, even though two thirds of them are in school.
759 million adults are illiterate and do not have the awareness necessary to improve both their living conditions and those of their children.

Why are children not in school?

One major reason is violence in the world’s ongoing conflict areas, including Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Nigeria. Half of all out-of-school children live in conflict-affected countries.
The other large barrier – often closely intertwined with conflict – is poverty.
In low-income countries public finances for education are very low: the annual spending in a high-income country like Austria is more than 200-times higher per student than in a low-income country like the Republic of Congo.
In the worst cases poverty requires children to work and this means they leave school early or never enter school in the first place.

Learning Poverty

Learning poverty means being unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10.

Worldwide, only 60 % of all three to six-year-olds have access to pre-primary education. In low-income countries, just one-in-five children has access to preschool.
The proportion of young people completing upper secondary school increased from 54 per cent in 2015 to only 58 per cent in 2020.
Most countries have not achieved gender parity in the proportion of children meeting minimum learning proficiency standards in reading.
In 2020, about one quarter of primary schools globally did not have access to basic services such as electricity, drinking water and sanitation facilities.
Roughly only 50 per cent of primary schools had access to facilities such as information technology and disability-adapted infrastructure.
Privatization of education is intensifying and funding for public education is being cut, increasing inequality.
About 263 million children and youth are out of school.
With less than a decade left on a critical global deadline, we know that the world is not on track to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goal #4 to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all.
At current rates, if we continue to make thecurrent rate of progress then by 2030 that number will have reduced by only 32 million students and we will have missed the target by 88%.

The UN has also reported that almost 69 million teachers need to be recruited worldwide by 2030 if international pledges on education are to be kept.

A survey among Education International’s 400 member organizations in 172 countries in mid-2019 provided a teaching perspective on the issue:

Too few governments have taken the necessary steps to implement Goal #4 and some have implemented policies that are actively undermining it.
Among the factors cited are under-investment, increasing privatization in public systems, poor employment and working conditions for teachers and education support personnel, including precarious contracts, unsafe work environments, high workloads and low salaries.

Primary education

The most marginalized children remain cut off from primary education – deprived of their right to develop foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) skills. An estimated 70% of 10-year-olds in low and middle income countries are now unable to understand a simple written text.

In low-income countries, only two thirds of children are estimated to complete primary school. Inequitable access exists across other divides: Children living in emergency and fragile settings, including refugee children, have fewer chances to complete primary school. Gender also plays a role, as girls who grow up in poor households are more likely than their male peers to have never attended or to have dropped out of primary school.

Secondary education

There are nearly 200 million lower and upper secondary school-age adolescent girls and boys out of school globally.
If current trends continue, another 825 million children will not acquire basic secondary-level skills by 2030.
In 2021, just two in three children of lower secondary school age attended either lower or upper secondary school, and only one in two children of upper secondary school age attended either upper secondary school or higher education.
From 2000 to 2020, the number of out-of-school children of lower secondary school-age shrank from 98 million to 63 million, and the number of out-of-school children of upper secondary school-age fell from 175 million to 132 million. Although notable progress has been made in the past few decades, challenges remain in reducing regional disparities and inequalities among secondary school-age students from different socio-economic backgrounds.

Financial deficit of developing countries

Many emerging countries do not appropriate the financial resources necessary to create schools, provide schooling materials, nor recruit and train teachers.
Funds pledged by the international community are generally not sufficient enough to allow countries to establish an education system for all children.
Equally, a lack of financial resources has an effect on the quality of teaching. Teachers do not benefit from basic teacher training and schools, of which there are not enough, have oversized classes.
This overflow leads to classes where many different educational levels are forced together which does not allow each individual child to benefit from an education adapted to their needs and abilities. As a result, the drop-out rate and education failure remain high.

Inequality between girls and boys: the education of girls in jeopardy

Today, it is girls who have the least access to education. They make up more than 54% of the non-schooled population in the world.
This problem occurs most frequently in the Arab States, in central Asia and in Southern and Western Asia and is principally explained by the cultural and traditional privileged treatment given to males - Girls are destined to work in the family home, whereas boys are entitled to receive an education.
In sub-Saharan Africa, over 12 million girls are at risk of never receiving an education. In Yemen, it is more than 80% of girls who will never have the opportunity to go to school. Even more alarming, certain countries such as Afghanistan or Somalia make no effort to reduce the gap between girls and boys with regard to education.
Although many developing countries may congratulate themselves on dramatically reducing inequality between girls and boys in education, a lot of effort is still needed in order to achieve a universal primary education.

(Data on Access to Education is sourced from: UNICEF, Our World in Data, Humanium, World Economic Forum and United Nations)