Новини

 

The National Statistics Institute outlined alarming trends in education in 2015 in its data, published in late April. Seriously increase of number of school dropouts, accompanied by a reduction in net enrollment rate - in all stages and levels of pre-primary and school education, alerted to the presence of systemic problems in the school system. Essentially, according ot the dropout levels and enrollment rates, Bulgarian school returns to the severe 2008 and 2009, when the closure of hundreds of schools left thousands of children outside the classrooms. The slight improvement in the last five years leaning analysts to the thought that the system was able to find the necessary balance in terms of delegated school budgets and optimization (mostly linked to the closure of small schools and the establishment of focal ones). The negative figures from the last year, however, indicate systemic problems. What's behind the figures, how sustainable worrying trends are,  which are the causing problem areas and what can be done?

 

 

The Figures

 

A review of the figures clearly showed a significant increase in school leavers and reduce of the net coefficients for enrollment in 2015. This applies to all levels and stages of education:

 

1. 232 thousand children were enrolled in pre-primary education, which is a decrease of 3.8% compared with 2014. Net coefficient of enrollment decreases by 1.9 percentage points, reaching levels of 81%,  i.e. 19% of the children aged 3 6 years, who were born in Bulgaria are not even enrolled in kindergartens. This rate would be raised even if you take into account children who are enrolled but rarely visit the garden or does not attend it regularly.

 

Decreasing the number of children, who are enrolled in kindergartens is a new phenomenon, after the trend has been upward in the previous 13 years and the number of enrolled children was increased from 199, 206 in the 2001/02 school year to 241,123 in 2014/15.

 

2. Considerable increase of school leavers in 2015: 21,146 students from a total of 749,094 have left the school, which is 2.82 %, i.e. 3352 more students have left school compared to the previous 2014 year and the dropout percentage has been raised from 2.36% to 2.82%. The net coefficient of enrollment declines in all stages to: