Is free pre-primary education associated with increased primary school completion? A global study

Alison Earle,Natalia Milovantseva,Jody Heymann

doi:10.1186/s40723-018-0054-1

Abstract

While global enrollment in primary education has increased significantly particularly since it became a target of the United Nations “Education for All” initiative and one of the Millennium Development Goals, primary completion rates have remained virtually unchanged since 1999. Evidence from studies of individual programs in a range of countries suggests that enrollment in pre-primary education can improve school readiness and achievement in primary school, and therefore, potentially raise primary completion rates. As research has also found that provision of free education is associated with higher enrollment, we hypothesize that provision of free and compulsory pre-primary education will be associated with higher primary school completion rates. Further, we hypothesize that free pre-primary education will have the largest impact where completion rates have been lowest. Using a database of quantitative, globally comparable measures of national provision of free pre-primary education we created, and data from UNESCO’s Institute for Education Statistics, we analyze the 104 nations with complete data. We conduct multivariate quantile regression analyses. We find that, controlling for national income and level of urbanization, provision of at least 1 year of free and compulsory pre-primary education is associated with a nearly 10 percentage point increase in primary school graduation rates for countries at the median and a 12 percentage point increase in rates for primarily low- and lower-middle-income countries at the lower end of the distribution.

Highlights

The world has made substantial progress in increasing primary education enrollment rates, among girls, following a series of global commitments to increase access to primary education including the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child, Art. 28 (1989), UN Millennium Development Goal 2 (2000), and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Education for All goals (UNESCO 1990, 2010)
Global data source we developed based on the latest available data on free and compulsory preprimary education in nations around the world, we examine whether the provision of at least 1 year of free and/or compulsory pre-primary education advances primary school completion
Is provision of free pre‐primary education associated with higher primary graduation rates? Provision of free pre-primary education alone in the year prior to entry to primary school was not found to significantly improve completion rates

Summary

Introduction

The world has made substantial progress in increasing primary education enrollment rates, among girls, following a series of global commitments to increase access to primary education including the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child, Art. 28 (1989), UN Millennium Development Goal 2 (2000), and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Education for All goals (UNESCO 1990, 2010). The greatest overall increase was among lowincome countries where primary school net enrollment rates increased from 54% in 2000 to an estimated 85% in 2015, and the female–male ratio from 0.85 to 0.94 Evidence suggests that eliminating tuition fees has been one of the most important drivers of primary enrollment increases, in low-income environments and where the rates of attending primary education are low (Kattan 2006). A year after Malawi introduced free primary education in 1994, enrollment rates increased 51%; in Burundi, which eliminated tuition in 2006, net primary school enrollment rose from 41% in 2000 to 94% in 2010 (UNICEF and the World Bank 2009; UN Statistics Division 2013). Eliminating fees may reduce socioeconomic gaps in education access, suggesting school fees are significant barriers for lower income families. The vast majority of countries have legislated tuition-free school at the primary level, and just 15 nations have yet to make primary education free and compulsory (Heymann 2013; de Guzman Chorny et al 2014)

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Conclusion