More Than 272 Million Children Out-Of-School Worldwide: Report

The number of out-of-school people worldwide is currently estimated at 272 million, more than 21 million higher than the previous estimate, UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Team (GEM) said.According to the team, in its recent report, it has noted that by 2025, nations will be behind by 75 million compared to their national targets.

"Two reasons underlie this rise. First, new enrollment and attendance figures explain eight million, or 38 per cent, of the increase. The prohibition on girls going to secondary school age in Afghanistan in 2021 is also responsible for this increase," the report added.

"Second, revised UN population projections cover 13 million, or the other 62 per cent, of the growth. Relative to the projections most recently used in the out-of-school model, the 2024 World Population Prospects have the number of 6- to 17-year-olds in 2025 (a proxy for the school-age group) up by 49 million (or by 3.1 per cent)," it said.

The report further added that the effects of conflicts on out-of-school population are hard to measure as conflicts impede data gathering.

The revision of the estimates of global population affects out-of-school rate and population estimates, but the size of the effect varies with the source of the data on enrolment and attendance.

"If the source is administrative data, then the entire growth of the population is transmitted to the out-of-school population since there is no new information on enrolment.".

"But if the source is survey data, then the growth of population is transmitted to the in-school and out-of-school populations proportionately. Since the model is based on survey data for the majority of countries with out-of-school populations that are large, only a portion of the added school-age population is being estimated to be out of school," it added.

Overall, approximately 11 per cent of the children of primary school age (78 million), 15 per cent of the adolescents of lower secondary school age (64 million) and 31 per cent of the young people of upper secondary school age (130 million) are not in school.

The model drew on multiple data sources (administrative, survey and census) to produce internally consistent trends of regional and global averages.

"The country-level model reconciles disparate sources, imputes values on years with no data, and uses short-term projections.

"They are thus not identical to countries' official values of out-of-school based on a single source for a particular year. It is these latter values, on which countries' out-of-school rate targets for 2025 and 2030 are based," the report added.

"Individually, as the SDG 4 Scorecard indicates, nations will cut their out-of-school number by 165 million by 2030 if targets are met.".

"Yet, it is estimated that by 2025 nations will be four percentage points off track for those of primary and lower secondary school age and six percentage points off track for those of upper secondary school age. Overall, this results in countries being already off-track by 75 million compared to their country-specific targets in 2025," it stated.

The report indicated that the contribution of conflict to out-of-school populations is underestimating.

"The out-of-school model estimates rely on assuming stable patterns of school-age population flow through the education system. This methodological rigour is turned against us in the context of emergencies and crises when school attendance shifts abruptly.".

"Not only is it impossible to assume that long-term trends will keep on going, but there is generally no data or not enough data to know how crises will affect short- and medium-term outcomes," it stated.

Conflict will make it difficult to gather data on school enrolment and hence is likely to result in an underestimate of the out-of-school groups, it added.