Amid ongoing warnings about the growing wave of school dropouts among children and teenagers in Iran, the regime’s minister of education announced that the number of children deprived of education in the country has reached 950,000.
Alireza Kazemi, in an interview with the state-run ILNA news agency, said that according to official system records and documents, around 950,000 students are considered either deprived of education or school dropouts.
Kazemi stated that the Ministry of Education has individual-level data on students deprived of education and dismissed the claims of some officials that two million students are out of school as “false.”
In October 2024, Farshad Ebrahimpour, a member of the regime’s parliamentary education commission, revealed hidden statistics on children deprived of education, saying that in the 2024-2025 academic year, around two million students were not registered for school, largely due to economic problems preventing families and students from completing the enrollment process.
Iran’s Statistical Center Reports Rise in School Dropout Rates
Regarding claims that students drop out of school to join the workforce, the education minister insisted that this is not true.
In May, the state-run daily Donya-e-Eqtesad reported that financial hardship and child labor to support household income were among the main causes of the rising number of children deprived of education in Iran.
In recent years, repeated warnings have been issued regarding the wave of school dropouts among Iranian children and teenagers, mainly due to family economic hardships.
In November 2024, Kazemi identified family, economic, and social factors as the main reasons students are deprived of education.
He said that dropping out of school for about 3% of the 950,000 deprived students was related to educational conditions.
Data from Iran’s Statistics Center, published in July 2024, showed that the dropout rate among elementary and lower secondary students increased in the 2023-2024 academic year compared to the previous year.
Declining student performance
Continuing his interview, Kazemi stressed that part of the decline in educational quality directly relates to the Ministry of Education itself. He cited “overcrowded and substandard classrooms, dependency on smartphones, disconnection between families and schools, language gaps in bilingual areas, and inadequate preschool coverage” as causes of declining student performance.
The minister of education, noting the drop in students’ average grades, added that “academic decline” must be seen as “multi-causal”: “Try teaching in a class of 50 students with no standards and see what results you get. Our teachers work with all their effort, but many factors are simply beyond their control.”
In November 2024, Gholamali Afrooz, a professor at Tehran University, stated that only 70% of Iranian students who enter elementary school eventually graduate from high school.
He added that 30% of students in the country fail to obtain a high school diploma, leaving the education system before graduation and joining the labor market instead.
The conflicting reports—ranging from 950,000 to 2 million deprived students—alongside declining learning quality, clearly reflect that the education crisis is serious and will not be solved through denial.
