The Statistical Center of Iran has announced that at least 556,000 Iranian adolescents are forced to drop out of school before entering high school due to reasons primarily related to “poverty and deprivation.”
According to a report published by Iran’s Statistical Center, titled “Social and Cultural Status of Iran, Spring 2023,” during the academic year 2022-2023, more than 556,000 children between the ages of 15 and 17 remained out of school, including 295,000 boys and 261,000 girls.
According to this report, the “dropout rate” in elementary education in the academic year 2016-2017 was “0.99 percent,” but after five years, during the academic year 2022-2023, it reached “1.2 percent,” and in the first cycle of secondary education, it was “4.11 percent,” gradually increasing to “5.47 percent,” indicating an upward trend.
These statistics were published at a time when, according to the regime’s Etemad newspaper, Ali Asghar Fani, the former Minister of Education, on September 10, based on the statistics from the Majlis (parliament) Research Center, declared the number of “school dropouts” in Iran as “930,000 individuals,” stating that they constitute the “illiterate future.”
Furthermore, according to Didban Iran website, the latest report from Iran’s Statistical Center emphasizes that due to the expansion of poverty and further reduction in children’s access to educational resources and facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, the deprivation of Iranian children from education has intensified.
On the other hand, the Fars province Teachers’ Guild Association wrote in a message on September 23 that they are starting the reopening of schools while “thousands of children are left out of education for various reasons,” and child labor, as the “victims of poverty,” are among the consequences of these dropouts.
According to the “Tajarat News” website on September 20, based on a survey by the “Sarmayeh polling agency”, the average price of stationery items has increased by 50 percent.
According to the results of this survey, about 60 percent of Tehran households pay tuition fees for their children’s education, and more than 53 percent of students in Tehran Province walk to school because the cost of school transportation has increased by more than 50 percent compared to the previous year.
Simultaneously with the increasing trend of dropping out and discontinuation of education among Iranian children, the Iranian regime takes actions such as expulsion, suspension from teaching, detention, or deprivation of certain members of the teaching staff from engaging in educational activities under the pretext of demanding trade union rights or expressing civil protests.
The information from the Statistical Center of Iran also indicates that the number of students dropping out of elementary education has been steadily increasing over a three-year period. In the academic year 2016-2017, the number of dropouts from elementary education was close to 162,000 individuals, which increased to over 210,000 individuals in the academic year 2020-2021.
Statistics also reveal that 70 percent of dropouts are associated with low-income brackets ranging from one to five.
