essay on free and compulsory education

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16.1 A Brief History of Education in the United States

Learning objectives.

• Explain why compulsory education arose during the 19th century.
• Outline some scholars’ criticisms of the rise of compulsory education.

Education is the social institution through which a society teaches its members the skills, knowledge, norms, and values they need to learn to become good, productive members of their society. As this definition makes clear, education is an important part of socialization. Education is both formal and informal . Formal education is often referred to as schooling , and as this term implies, it occurs in schools under teachers, principals, and other specially trained professionals. Informal education may occur almost anywhere, but for young children it has traditionally occurred primarily in the home, with their parents as their instructors. Day care has become an increasingly popular venue in industrial societies for young children’s instruction, and education from the early years of life is thus more formal than it used to be.

Education in early America was hardly formal. During the colonial period, the Puritans in what is now Massachusetts required parents to teach their children to read and also required larger towns to have an elementary school, where children learned reading, writing, and religion. In general, though, schooling was not required in the colonies, and only about 10% of colonial children, usually just the wealthiest, went to school, although others became apprentices (Urban, Jennings, & Wagoner, 2008).

To help unify the nation after the Revolutionary War, textbooks were written to standardize spelling and pronunciation and to instill patriotism and religious beliefs in students. At the same time, these textbooks included negative stereotypes of Native Americans and certain immigrant groups. The children going to school continued primarily to be those from wealthy families. By the mid-1800s, a call for free, compulsory education had begun, and compulsory education became widespread by the end of the century. This was an important development, as children from all social classes could now receive a free, formal education. Compulsory education was intended to further national unity and to teach immigrants “American” values. It also arose because of industrialization, as an industrial economy demanded reading, writing, and math skills much more than an agricultural economy had.

In colonial America, only about 10% of children went to school, and these children tended to come from wealthy families. After the Revolutionary War, new textbooks helped standardize spelling and pronunciation and promote patriotism and religious beliefs, but these textbooks also included negative stereotypes of Native Americans.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Free, compulsory education, of course, applied only to primary and secondary schools. Until the mid-1900s, very few people went to college, and those who did typically came from the fairly wealthy families. After World War II, however, college enrollments soared, and today more people are attending college than ever before, even though college attendance is still related to social class, as we shall discuss shortly.

At least two themes emerge from this brief history. One is that until very recently in the record of history, formal schooling was restricted to wealthy males. This means that boys who were not white and rich were excluded from formal schooling, as were virtually all girls, whose education was supposed to take place informally at home. Today, as we will see, race, ethnicity, social class, and, to some extent, gender continue to affect both educational achievement and the amount of learning occurring in schools.

Second, although the rise of free, compulsory education was an important development, the reasons for this development trouble some critics (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Cole, 2008). Because compulsory schooling began in part to prevent immigrants’ values from corrupting “American” values, they see its origins as smacking of ethnocentrism. They also criticize its intention to teach workers the skills they needed for the new industrial economy. Because most workers were very poor in this economy, these critics say, compulsory education served the interests of the upper/capitalist class much more than it served the interests of workers. It was good that workers became educated, say the critics, but in the long run their education helped the owners of capital much more than it helped the workers themselves. Whose interests are served by education remains an important question addressed by sociological perspectives on education, to which we now turn.

Key Takeaways

• Until very recently in the record of history, formal schooling was restricted to wealthy males.
• The rise of free, compulsory education was an important development that nonetheless has been criticized for orienting workers in the 19th century to be disciplined and to obey authority.

For Your Review

• Write a brief essay in which you summarize the benefits and disadvantages of the rise of compulsory education during the 19th century.

Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reforms and the contradictions of economic life . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Cole, M. (2008). Marxism and educational theory: Origins and issues . New York, NY: Routledge.

Urban, W. J., Jennings L., & Wagoner, J. (2008). American education: A history (4th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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This essay is part of a series highlighting global human rights trends in 2022. Read more  here .

Education is fundamental for children’s development and a powerful catalyst for improving their entire lives. International human rights law guarantees everyone a right to education. But it surprises many to learn that the international human rights framework only explicitly guarantees an immediate right to free primary education—even though we know that a child equipped with just a primary education is inadequately prepared to thrive in today’s world.

Children who participate in education from the pre-primary through to the secondary level have better health, better job prospects, and higher earnings as adults. And they are less vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, including child labor and child marriage.

All countries have made a political commitment through the United Nations “ Sustainable Development Goals ” to providing by 2030 both access to pre-primary education for all, and that all children complete free secondary school education. Yet the world appears on track to fail these targets , and children deserve more than yet another round of non-binding pledges.

For these reasons, Human Rights Watch believes that it’s time to take countries that made these commitments at their word, and expand the right to education under international law. It should explicitly recognize that all children should have a right to early childhood education, including at least one year of free pre-primary education, as well as a right to free secondary education.

We are not alone in this belief.

In 2019, the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education and the Latin American Campaign for the Right to Education met with experts from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child to share their research , concluding that the legally binding human rights framework failed to adequately specify that the right to education should begin in early childhood, before primary school.

In December 2021, UNESCO—the UN education organization— concluded that in light of 21st century trends and challenges, the right to education should be reframed, and that recognizing early childhood education as a legal right at the international level “would allow the international community to hold governments accountable and ensure there is adequate investment.”

In 2022, these sparks began to catch fire.

In June, various international children’s rights and human rights experts called for the expansion of the right to education under international law, to recognize every child’s right to free pre-primary education and free secondary education. In September, the Nobel Prize laureate and education champion Malala Yousafzai and the environmental youth activist Vanessa Nakate were among over a half-a-million people around the world who signed an open letter from the global civic movement Avaaz, calling on world leaders to create a new global treaty that protects children’s right to free education—from pre-primary through secondary school.

Argentina and Spain announced their commitments to support the idea at the UN’s Transforming Education summit in September. In October, the UN’s top independent education expert recommended that the right to early childhood education should be enshrined in a legally-binding human rights instrument. And the year ended on a high note with education ministers and delegations gathered at the November World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education in Uzbekistan adopting the new “ Tashkent Declaration ,” in which they agreed to enhance legal frameworks to ensure the right to education “includes the right to at least one year of free and compulsory pre-primary quality education for all children.”

So what might happen in 2023? All concerned will turn to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to see whether member countries will agree to start the process to begin drafting such a treaty. At least half of all countries already guarantee at least one year of free pre-primary education or free secondary education under their own domestic laws and policies. This includes low- and middle- income countries from around the world. That means that there’d be a large constituency of countries potentially willing to sign such a treaty when adopted.

Even when human rights feel under threat around the world, it’s vital for the human rights movement not to be on the defensive. Making the positive case for strengthening and advancing human rights standards has a critical role in shaping and improving the future. Guaranteeing the best conditions for children to access a quality, inclusive, free education—and thereby to develop their personalities, talents, mental and physical abilities, and prepare them for a responsible life in a free society—is the kind of positive human rights agenda that all countries should rally around in 2023.

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Guest Essay

School Is for Everyone

By Anya Kamenetz

Ms. Kamenetz is a longtime education reporter and the author of “The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now,” from which this essay is adapted.

For the majority of human history, most people didn’t go to school. Formal education was a privilege for the Alexander the Greats of the world, who could hire Aristotles as private tutors.

Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States began to establish truly universal, compulsory education. It was a social compact: The state provides public schools that are free and open to all. And children, for most of their childhood, are required to receive an education. Today, nine out of 10 do so in public schools.

To an astonishing degree, one person, Horace Mann, the nation’s first state secretary of education, forged this reciprocal commitment. The Constitution doesn’t mention education. In Southern colonies, rich white children had tutors or were sent overseas to learn. Teaching enslaved people to read was outlawed. Those who learned did so by luck, in defiance or in secret.

But Mann came from Massachusetts, the birthplace of the “common school” in the 1600s, where schoolmasters were paid by taking up a collection from each group of households. Mann expanded on that tradition. He crossed the state on horseback to visit every schoolhouse, finding mostly neglected, drafty old wrecks. He championed schools as the crucible of democracy — his guiding principle, following Thomas Jefferson, was that citizens cannot sustain both ignorance and freedom.

An essential part of Mann’s vision was that public schools should be for everyone and that children of different class backgrounds should learn together. He pushed to draw wealthier students away from private schools, establish “normal schools” to train teachers (primarily women), have the state take over charitable schools and increase taxes to pay for it all.

He largely succeeded. By the early 20th century all states had free primary schools, underwritten by taxpayers, that students were required to attend.

And that’s more or less how America became the nation we recognize today. The United States soon boasted one of the world’s highest literacy rates among white people. It is hard to imagine how we could have established our industrial and scientific might, welcomed newcomers from all over the world, knit our democracy back together after the Civil War and become a wealthy nation with high living standards without schoolhouses.

The consensus on schooling has never been perfect. Private schools older than the nation continue to draw the elite. Public schools in many parts of the country were segregated by law until the mid-20th century, and they are racially and economically segregated to this day.

But Mann’s inclusive vision is under particular threat right now. Extended school closures during the coronavirus pandemic effectively broke the social compact of universal, compulsory schooling.

School closures threw our country back into the educational atomization that characterized the pre-Mann era. Wealthy parents hired tutors for their children; others opted for private and religious schools that reopened sooner; some had no choice but to leave their children alone in the house all day or send them to work for wages while the schoolhouse doors were closed.

Students left public schools at a record rate and are still leaving, particularly in the blue states and cities that kept schools closed longer. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (known as the Nation’s Report Card) dropped significantly this year: 9-year-olds lost ground in math for the first time since the test came out in the 1970s, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than three decades. The drop in math was much worse for Black students than for their white peers. Home-schooling is on the rise, private schools have gained students, and an unknown number have dropped out altogether; Los Angeles said up to 50,000 students were absent on the first day of class this year. Teachers are experiencing intense burnout, and schools have many staff vacancies.

Meanwhile, a well-funded, decades-old movement that wants to do away with public school as we know it is in ascendance.

This movement rejects Mann’s vision that schools should be the common ground where a diverse society discovers how to live together. Instead, it believes families should educate their children however they wish, or however they can. It sees no problem with Republican schools for Republican students, Black schools for Black students, Christian schools for Christian students and so on, as long as those schools are freely chosen. Recent Supreme Court decisions open the door to both prayer in schools and public funding of religious education, breaking with Mann’s nonsectarian ideal.

If we want to renew the benefits that public schools have brought to America, we need to recommit to the vision Mann advocated. Our democracy sprouts in the nursery of public schools — where students grapple together with our messy history and learn to negotiate differences of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. Freedom of thought will wilt if schools foist religious doctrine of any kind onto students. And schools need to be enriched places, full of caring adults who have the support and resources they need to teach effectively.

Without public education delivered as a public good, the asylum seeker in detention, the teenager in jail, not to mention millions of children growing up in poverty, will have no realistic way to get the instruction they need to participate in democracy or support themselves. And students of privilege will stay confined in their bubbles. Americans will lose the most powerful social innovation that helps us construct a common reality and try, imperfectly, to understand one another.

It’s a testament to the success of our schools that it took the pandemic shutdowns for many people to see all the essential roles they play in society. The length of these closures made the United States an outlier among other wealthy nations. They forced Americans to ask themselves: What is school for?

For Melissa Henderson , a single mother of five in Georgia, school was a safe place for her kids. With schools and day cares closed in May 2020, she left her 14-year-old daughter in charge of her younger siblings. Ms. Henderson was arrested and charged with reckless conduct.

For Alexis, a 10-year-old on Maui, school was a place to be with her friends. She has a rare genetic condition and is autistic. When schools closed, she went from a “happy, bubbly, loving-life child” to “flat and empty and not really there — like a robot,” said her mother , Vanessa Ince. Alexis regressed from walking to crawling, went back to wearing diapers and stopped using a communication device.

For Osvaldo Rivas Santiago, a 15-year-old growing up in foster care in Vancouver, Wash., school was where he set goals for himself and excelled. He had trouble willing himself to stay focused with remote learning.

“It impacts your motivation,” he told me. “You tend to not really care about school at all.”

The shutdowns reminded Americans that schools provide vital services besides learning. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, slammed “people who saw teachers as glorified babysitters” before the pandemic. But the fact is, public school is the nation’s major source of free child care for working families. Moreover, tens of millions of children depend on school for meals, safety, special education services and therapies, and English language learning.

They are also hubs of community togetherness.

I live around the corner from my daughter’s public elementary school in Brooklyn, a sprawling brick building dating to 1895. At the start of the pandemic, the cheerful daily rush of cargo bikes, scooters and children walking to school gave way to an eerie silence punctuated by the howl of ambulances.

Without the ability to meet in person regularly, some neighborly relationships curdled. Someone removed the schoolyard’s Black Lives Matter and Pride flags, and suspicions flew. Here and across the country, school board and P.T.A. meetings moved online and sometimes stretched into the wee hours of the night as parents yelled themselves hoarse over reopening protocols and varying responses to the nation’s racial upheaval.

Some Americans missed schools when they were closed, and others distanced themselves. The extended blue state closures were a failure on the part of Democrats, who have historically been the party that Americans trust over Republicans when it comes to education. That trust eroded during the pandemic, as many Democratic governors and mayors seemed unable to balance families’ needs with fears of a deadly virus. Today, the few union leaders and other educators who have impugned or outright denied the existence of learning loss are coming pretty close to arguing that public schools accomplish nothing. If being at home for a year and a half didn’t have any negative impact on children, why do we need school?

All of this emboldened a movement on the right that has for more than half a century sought to dismantle public education and the idea that Americans from diverse backgrounds should learn alongside one another.

Corey DeAngelis, a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, told me that “the teachers unions’ influence on keeping the schools closed for so long” opened the door to expanded alternatives. His dream is a universal voucher program, where taxpayer funds are parceled out directly to families to spend as they wish, with no public school “monopoly.” Meaning, no collectively funded infrastructure to provide education as a public good.

This dream began, more or less, in 1955, when the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman published the first manifesto arguing for school vouchers to replace publicly administered education. James McGill Buchanan, a University of Chicago-trained economist teaching at the University of Virginia, took the argument further by seizing on the era’s post-Brown v. Board of Education segregationist fervor. As Nancy MacLean summarizes in “Democracy in Chains,” her acclaimed but polarizing 2017 intellectual history of the right in America, Buchanan intuited that if rich white people could be convinced that they were justified in no longer paying for public schools, it opened the door to resist all taxation, all public goods. And he supplied that justification. He came to argue that it was anti-liberty to force people of wealth, a minority, to ante up for goods enjoyed by the majority.

What was called “massive resistance” to integration was so strong that some places in the South chose to close public schools altogether rather than see them integrated. In the fall of 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower called in the 101st Airborne to protect the Little Rock Nine. The next year, the Arkansas Legislature and the governor tried to block desegregation by closing Little Rock’s four public high schools, Black and white, entirely. It became known as the Lost Year. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, officials went even further, closing the schools from 1959 all the way to 1964, while providing private schooling to white children.

This was an outright rejection of Mann’s ideal that Americans should be educated at public schools that serve everyone. And the mark of that rejection remains to this day. Throughout the South, white children attend private schools that began as so-called segregation academies during the civil rights era, while many Black children attend the hollowed-out public schools that white students left behind. And elsewhere the pattern is repeated — in fact, schools in the Northeast are among the most segregated in the country.

The movement Friedman and Buchanan encouraged lives on. Opposition to public education, and the promotion of alternatives like vouchers and for-profit schools, has attracted Catholics long devoted to parochial schools, evangelical Christians and other religious groups, cultural conservatives, corporate capitalists and libertarians. Today they are joined by the millionaires and billionaires who see K-12 education as another sector ripe for disruption.

In other words, the core constituencies of today’s Republican Party, otherwise seemingly so disparate, unite over this one issue. Their shared agenda is to privatize and defund schools.

This movement could have no better avatar than Betsy DeVos, who had never taught in, attended or sent her children to a public school before President Donald Trump named her secretary of education. “I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” she said in July .

During the pandemic, Ms. DeVos diverted a disproportionate share of federal relief funds to private schools until a judge declared her actions illegal. She proposed a federal school voucher program.

And she declined to direct the Department of Education to track school reopening plans or Covid mitigation strategies, abdicating responsibility for helping districts reopen safely, even as the Trump administration called for them to reopen at any cost. Her approach signaled exactly what the agenda will be if Republicans regain control of the federal government.

And though Mr. Trump is out of office (for now), and Ms. DeVos with him, the Supreme Court justices the former president nominated have opened the door to both prayer in public schools and the public funding of religious schools . Right-wing donors , many of whom have long histories of opposing public education, have backed the activists whipping up a fervor over the treatment of race and queer and trans rights in the classroom. In the eyes of conservative activists, public education is the enemy of the people, alongside the deep state and the mainstream media, and they are working hard to make the American people believe it too.

Mann’s vision of public schools is at stake right now. Not only his vision of school as the great equalizer, the place where disadvantaged groups gain access to social and economic capital, which is important enough, but also his view of school as the place where Americans can give up ignorance in exchange for freedom.

This country has seemingly never had a harder time embracing a shared reality or believing in common values. The parents who are showing up at school boards yelling about “critical race theory” and pronouns are trying to get public schools to bend history, reality and values to their liking. I disagree with them vehemently, but I also want them to stay in the argument. It would be far worse if these parents went home and created their own schools. Because their children would then grow up with one set of unchallenged beliefs, while my children and the children of like-minded people would grow up with another — emerging as adults who have no hope of understanding one another, much less living together peacefully.

If we lose public education, flawed as it is, the foundations of our democracy will slip. Not only the shared knowledge base but also the skills of citizenship itself: communication, empathy and compromise across differences.

I grew up Jewish in the Bible Belt, studious and serious. My Christian classmates sometimes taunted me that I was going to hell.

I can only imagine how I would have felt if my teachers had openly agreed. If my textbooks were full of conspiracy theories about “globalists” and Jewish space lasers. If I and my friends who were Jain or Buddhist had to choose between attending a school that conformed to the majority of our neighbors’ religious beliefs and staying home.

As it was, it was hard to be singled out. But that experience of difference helped me connect with Creole children, and those whose families came from Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Taiwan, India, Nigeria — brought to the land of football and po’ boys by the oil industry and jobs at Louisiana State University. And some of my closest friends were from white, churchgoing families too. We did the Cajun two-step, lined up for the geography bee and learned to be together, imperfectly, in this ever-various country.

Anya Kamenetz ( @anya1anya ) is a longtime education reporter and the author of “The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now,” from which this essay is adapted.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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According to international human rights law, primary education shall be compulsory and free of charge. Secondary and higher education shall be made progressively free of charge.

Free primary education is fundamental in guaranteeing everyone has access to education. However, in many developing countries, families often cannot afford to send their children to school, leaving millions of children of school-age deprived of education. Despite international obligations, some states keep on imposing fees to access primary education. In addition, there are often indirect costs associated with education, such as for school books, uniform or travel, that prevent children from low-income families accessing school.

Financial difficulties states may face cannot relieve them of their obligation to guarantee free primary education. If a state is unable to secure compulsory primary education, free of charge, when it ratifies the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966), it still has the immediate obligation, within two years, to work out and adopt a detailed plan of action for its progressive implementation, within a reasonable numbers of years, to be fixed in the plan (ICESCR, Article 14). For more information, see General Comment 11  (1999) of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

'Progressive introduction of free education' means that while states must prioritise the provision of free primary education, they also have an obligation to take concrete steps towards achieving free secondary and higher education ( General Comment 13 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1999: Para. 14).

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948, Article 26)
• International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966, Articles 13 and 14)
• Convention on the Rights of the Child  (1982, Article 28)
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women  (1979, Article 10)
• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006, Article 24)
• UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education  (1960, Articles 4)
• ILO Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (1999, Preamble, Articles 7 and 8)
• African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990, Article 11)
• African Youth Charter (2006, Articles 13 and 16)
• Charter of the Organisation of American States (1967, Article 49)
• Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights, Protocol of San Salvador (1988, Article 13)
• Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union  (2000, Article 14)
• European Social Charter  (revised) (1996, Articles 10 and 17)
• Arab Charter on Human Rights  (2004, Article 41)
• ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (2012, Article 31)

For more details, see International Instruments - Free and Compulsory Education

The following case-law on free education includes decisions of national, regional and international courts as well as decisions from national administrative bodies, national human rights institutions and international human rights bodies.

Claim of unconstitutionality against article 183 of the General Education Law (Colombia Constitutional Court; 2010)

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The 14th Amendment Protects the Right to a Public Education

Over the years, the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution has had an enormous impact on protecting individual rights in public elementary and secondary education. This has occurred through the United States Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the incorporation of other rights (like freedom of speech) to the states through the 14th Amendment.

Equal Protection Clause

The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment provides that a state may not “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It applies to public elementary and secondary schools, as they are considered to be state actors. In 1954, the Supreme Court interpreted the Equal Protection Clause’s requirements in  Brown v. Board of Education . In perhaps one of the most famous and important cases issued by the Court, it stated:

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs…are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

That language, and the Court’s decision, had a dramatic impact on public education. Schools were required to end the discriminatory practice of segregating students based on race. While segregation was more prevalent in some states than in others, all public schools in all states that had segregated students needed to desegregate, or face claims that they were in violation of the 14th Amendment. What followed was roughly 50 years of desegregation efforts in public schools, and numerous court decisions regarding the constitutionality of those desegregation efforts.

Over time, the focus evolved from ending and remedying the vestiges of discriminatory practices to integration efforts that sought to promote the diversity of the student population in public schools. In some instances, these integration efforts were voluntary, meaning they were done by schools that had not segregated students in the past. These integration efforts continue to this day, and the predominant legal issues revolve around the extent to which race can be used as a factor in the assignment of students to certain schools in order to diversify the student body.

The language, and the logic, of the  Brown v. Board  decision also found its way into other types of Equal Protection claims. For example, in the mid-1970s, students with disabilities challenged their exclusion from public school on equal protection grounds. Two very influential lower court decisions,  PARC v Commonwealth of Pennsylvania , and  Mills v. Board of Education of the District of Columbia , relied on  Brown v. Board  and determined that students with disabilities could not be excluded from public school because of their disabilities.

Those court decisions led to a federal statute that imposed similar requirements on all public schools that accepted certain federal funds. That law turned into the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which today applies to all public schools. The law requires public schools to provide all students with disabilities with a  Free and Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) . It also prohibits schools from expelling or suspending students with disabilities for longer than 10 days, when the student’s actions are caused by their disability.

Due Process Clause

Due process is another area of the 14th Amendment that has had a dramatic impact on individual rights in public education. The Due Process Clause says that states may not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Supreme Court has interpreted this clause to have substantive and procedural protections. With substantive due process, the 14th Amendment protects a parent’s right to direct the educational upbringing of their child. Because of this right, the Supreme Court ruled that a state statute that prohibited the teaching of foreign language, and a state statute that required all students to attend public schools, as opposed to private schools, violated the 14th Amendment. See  Meyer v. Nebraska  and  Pierce v. Society of Sisters . The Court also ruled that a state statute that required Amish children to attend school past the eighth grade violated the substantive due process rights, and the religious freedom rights, of Amish parents to direct the educational and religious upbringing of their children. See  Wisconsin v. Yoder .

As a result of these substantive due process protections, all states currently have exceptions in their state compulsory attendance statutes that require students of certain ages to attend school. The exceptions allow for attendance at private schools, religious schools, and homeschool to meet the compulsory attendance requirements.

The procedural due process protections of the 14th Amendment have also played an important role in public education, particularly in the areas of student discipline and teacher employment. With student discipline, the Supreme Court has ruled that students have a “legitimate entitlement to a public education as a property right.” See  Goss v. Lopez . That right may not be taken away without first providing due process protections, which are generally notice of what the student is accused of doing, and the opportunity to be heard before the student is disciplined.

The required amount of notice and opportunity to be heard increases as the severity of the discipline increases. With minor disciplinary actions, an informal discussion with the principal may be sufficient to meet the requirements. For more severe discipline, such as expulsion, a more detailed hearing is generally required to give the student a chance to present evidence, and to cross-examine witnesses. As a result of these constitutional due process protections, all states have enacted statutes and regulations that provide due process protections for students during the discipline process.

A similar due process right applies to tenured teachers at public elementary and secondary schools. Once a teacher receives tenured status, they have a property interest in their continued employment, and must be provided with notice and a hearing before it may be taken away from them. See  Perry v. Sindermann .

Incorporation

The third area where the 14th Amendment has impacted public schools is in the application of other constitutional rights to the states through the 14th Amendment, via a concept known as  incorporation . Perhaps the biggest impact here has been the First Amendment’s right to free speech, although other protections like freedom of religion have also made their mark on public education.

In the area of free speech, the Supreme Court has said that students and teachers do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” See  Tinker v. Des Moines . While courts do give some deference to school administrators in making decisions about whether to prohibit certain student speech, the First Amendment requires schools to justify their decisions when they infringe on free speech rights. The level of justification required depends on the nature of the speech, and the nature of the restriction.

For example, in  Tinker v. Des Moines , students were protesting the Vietnam War by wearing armbands, and the school disciplined the students for doing so. The Supreme Court ruled that the discipline violated the First Amendment, because the school could not show that the speech could reasonably be expected to cause a substantial disruption with school activities or the rights of others. By contrast, in  Morse v. Frederick , the Supreme Court deferred to a school administrator’s judgment that a sign that said “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” promoted drug use, and upheld the discipline of the students that displayed the sign at a school event.

These are just a few examples of the many ways that the 14th Amendment impacts individual rights in public education. Many of these issues arise on a daily basis in public schools, and the 14th Amendment provides some constitutional protections of individual rights that schools must take into account when addressing them.

Scott F. Johnson

Scott F. Johnson is a Professor of Law at Purdue Global Law School (formerly Concord Law School), where he teaches Education Law and Special Education Law, among other topics. He has written a number of books and articles in the education law area. Professor Johnson’s law practice included education and special education cases, and he currently serves as a special education hearing officer for a state agency.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the view of Purdue Global Law School.

Employment and Career Advancement:  Purdue Global Law School cannot guarantee employment or career advancement.

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Right To Education Act 2009

The Parliament of India enacted the Right To Education Act 2009 to grapple with the downward spiral of the education system and poor learning outcomes. The act aims towards providing free and compulsory elementary education to kids between the age group of 6 years to 14 years . The Indian government wants every Indian child to get a quality education, irrespective of gender, caste, creed, and family income.

The RTE Act was enacted on 4 August 2009, and since its inception, we have seen a lot of changes in the enrolment levels, equitable access, literacy rates of states and education standards. Let us look at the impact of the right to education act and the important statistics you need to know.

What Is RTE Act 2009?

The enactment of the Right to Education Act under Article 21a of the Indian Constitution was a major move to change the failing landscape of education in India. Education is one of the most powerful tools to uplift a nation and equip children with essential skills. According to a report by UNESCO, 159 countries around the world guarantee free education for 9 years or more and India is now a part of the list.

Important points to remember:

• The act came into effect on 1 April 2010 and it clearly states education is a fundamental right of every child.
• All private schools must keep 25% of seats reserved for children belonging to weaker sections of society.
• Unrecognized schools cannot interview a child or the parent for admission.
• No child pursuing elementary education shall be held back, expelled, or asked to pass a board examination.
• The RTE act 2009 offers provisions for students who dropped out of school.
• Schools are not allowed to charge any capitation fee at any step while giving admission to a child.
• All government and aided schools should create a School Management Committee composed of 75 percent members as parents or guardians.

Importance of Education

Why are 159 countries focusing on improving and providing quality education to their citizens? Since our Independence, Indian governments have worked on various educational policies and financial interventions. Education is a key concern for all political parties, NGOs and society. But why? Let us find out.

• Education provides opportunities for career development and stability in life .
• A college degree and knowledge of your subjects increase your chances of getting higher-paying jobs resulting in financial security .
• Access to quality education reduces the gaps between social classes and uplifts the marginalized sections of society.
• Education reduces crime and makes our society more peaceful as educated individuals are less likely to participate in criminal activities.
• Education improves critical thinking and analytical skills.
• Quality education is one of the most important tools for gaining confidence and expressing your thoughts, perspectives, feelings, or ideas.

Impact of Right to Education Act 2009 on India Education System

Increase in Enrolment in the Upper Primary Levels The Right to Education act is responsible for increasing the enrolment rate in classes 6 to 8, also known as upper primary classes. As per the data published by the District Information System of Education, between 2009 and 2016, students enrolling in upper primary classes increased by 19.4 percent.

Table 1: Percentage increase in enrolment in the upper primary levels

Source: District Information System of Education

Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan show a steady increase in enrolment numbers in upper primary grades.

However, the enrolment numbers for the same are on a downward trend for Madhya Pradesh, Assam and West Bengal

Table 2b: Percentage Decrease in Enrolment of Students in the Upper Primary Section(2014-2016, Bottom Three States)

Improved Infrastructure Norms

The RTE Act Section 19 clearly specifies these norms:

• Maintain a teacher–student ratio of 1:30.
• All recognized schools must have ramps for students with disabilities.
• Clean drinking water facilities on the school premises.
• Playground for students.

According to the data published by the District Information System of Education, only 13% of all schools are fully equipped to comply with the RTE norms.

The lack of funds and poor management are the two major challenges that need to be resolved quickly. School administrators need to make the best use of the available resources, especially in the rural areas.

25% Quota under the Right to Education Act

One of the primary goals of the RTE Act 2009 is to ensure that every child in India, irrespective of their caste, creed, gender and socioeconomic status, gets a quality education. We have moved from policy-level decisions to creating an environment that promotes education as a fundamental right and a legal obligation of states.

RTE Act 2009 Section 12(1)(c) states that all schools must reserve at least 25% of their seats for children from marginalized and financially backward sections of society.

25-percent reservation strives for social integration of economically weaker sections (EWS) and disadvantaged groups (DG). The school premises should be a neutral place that welcomes all children to learn and grow together.

The central government reimburses the schools for all students that get admission because of the 25% quota.

State-wise variations in the number of admissions under the RTE Act 2009 Section 12(1)(c) are still a big hurdle. For example, Madhya Pradesh filled 88.2 percent of the quota seats while Andhra Pradesh could only fill 0.21 percent. The disparity in the numbers is due to variable state budgets, policy interventions, families’ socioeconomic status, awareness and ease of the process.

“For instance, in 2013-14, Madhya Pradesh had a fill rate of 88.2 percent and Rajasthan’s stood at 69.3 percent. The performance of these two states was in stark contrast to that of Uttar Pradesh, for example, which had a fill rate of 3.62 percent, and Andhra Pradesh with 0.21 percent.”

Criticism of the RTE Act 2009

• Discrimination towards parents and students who belong to the economically weaker sections (EWS) and disadvantaged groups (DG).
• Students have a hard time blending in with other students.
• Lack of confidence in government schools
• Local authorities cannot keep track of children who can benefit from the RTE Act 2009 Section 12(1)(c), and therefore they cannot seek out children for admission.
• First-generation students are unable to out the form and miss out on admissions. For example, nearly 33% of applications submitted in Gujarat for admissions under the RTE act were incomplete or inaccurate.
• Private schools deny admissions as they do not get reimbursed on time.
• Some parents were asked to pay for the application or donate money for the admissions.
• Delays in the admissions process result in students dropping out of the program or not getting admission on time.

Other Significant Government Policies that have shaped Indian Education System

• 1950 Constitutional Mandate
• National Policy of Education 1986
• Shri Unnikrishnan judgment 1993
• Mid-day Meal Scheme 1995
• Education Ministers’ Resolve 1998
• Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) 2001

The Right to Education Act is one of the most important reforms in the Indian education system and it has a cascading effect on students’ lives. But a number of cities, villages and towns are still lacking in implementation and management processes. While we can see an increase in the number of admissions in schools under the RTE act, learning outcomes are on a decline.

See the image below to understand the difference in learning outcomes pre and post Right to Education Act. Note: The results shown below are averages of the data of various sampled districts.

Check the image below for more insights:

Another area of concern is the number of girls completing their secondary and higher secondary education. Here are some alarming statistics that show how serious the situation is when it comes to girls’ education in our country :

• 1.6 million girls never get the opportunity to study in a school.
• 57% of girls drop out of school before passing the 12th standard.
• Only 10.35% of girls from the ST caste complete their elementary education. This percentage goes down to 6.8% for higher secondary education.

How can you help?

At CARE India, we work with marginalized women and girls , improving their participation in the education ecosystem. We strive towards building a society that is tolerant, educated, free of poverty and treats people with dignity.

Our Girls’ Education Program (GEP) is working towards improving girls’ education and the overall development of the education system. If you want to become a part of our initiative, you can donate to CARE India.

FAQs about Right To Education Act

The Right to Education (RTE) Act ensures free and compulsory education for all children between the age of 6 years and 14 years.

RTE 2009 act has 38 sections.

The student’s age must be between 6 years to 14 years and must be a domicile of India. 25% of the seats are reserved for economically weaker sections (EWS) and disadvantaged groups (DG).

The RTE Act came into effect on 1 April 2010, making education a fundamental right.

According to the RTE quota, 25-percent seats in recognized schools are reserved for economically weaker sections (EWS) and disadvantaged groups (DG)

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Right to Education Act (RTE) - Indian Polity Notes

The Right to Education Act (RTE) is important legislation that marks a watershed in the education system in India. With its enactment, the right to education has become a fundamental right in the country. In this article, you can read all about the RTE, its significance, provisions and challenges for the UPSC exam .

Read about important acts in India in the linked article.

Right to Education Act

The Act is completely titled “the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act” . It was passed by the Parliament in August 2009. When the Act came into force in 2010, India became one among 135 countries where education is a fundamental right of every child.

• “The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of 6 to 14 years in such manner as the State, may by law determine.”
• As per this, the right to education was made a fundamental right and removed from the list of Directive Principles of State Policy.
• The RTE is the consequential legislation envisaged under the 86th Amendment.
• The article incorporates the word “free” in its title. What it means is that no child (other than those admitted by his/her parents in a school not supported by the government) is liable to pay any kind of fee or charges or expenses which may prevent him or her from pursuing and completing elementary education.
• This Act makes it obligatory on the part of the government to ensure admission, attendance and completion of elementary education by all children falling in the age bracket six to fourteen years.
• Essentially, this Act ensures free elementary education to all children in the economically weaker sections of society.

A few important articles that a candidate must read to cover the notes on the topic, ‘Education,’ comprehensively are linked below:

RTE Provisions

The provisions of the RTE Act are briefly described below. The Act provides for:

• The right of free and compulsory education to children until they complete their elementary education in a school in the neighbourhood.
• The Act makes it clear that ‘compulsory education’ implies that it is an obligation on the part of the government to ensure the admission, attendance and completion of elementary education of children between the ages of six and fourteen. The word ‘free’ indicates that no charge is payable by the child which may prevent him/her from completing such education.
• The Act provides for the admission of a non-admitted child to a class of his/her appropriate age.
• It mentions the duties of the respective governments, the local authorities and parents in ensuring the education of a child. It also specifies the sharing of the financial burden between the central and the state governments.
• It specifies standards and norms for Pupil Teacher Ratios (PTR), infrastructure and buildings, working days of the school and for the teachers.
• It also says there should be no urban-rural imbalance in teacher postings. The Act also provides for the prohibition of the employment of teachers for non-educational work, other than census, elections and disaster relief work.
• The Act provides that the teachers appointed should be appropriately trained and qualified.
• Mental harassment and physical punishment.
• Screening procedures for the admission of children.
• Capitation fees.
• Private tuition by the teachers.
• Running schools with no recognition.
• The Act envisages that the curriculum should be developed in coherence with the values enshrined in the Indian Constitution, and that which would take care of the all-round development of the child. The curriculum should build on the knowledge of the child, on his/her potentiality and talents, help make the child free of trauma, fear and anxiety via a system that is both child-centric and child-friendly.

Significance of RTE

With the passing of the Right to Education Act, India has moved to a rights-based approach towards implementing education for all. This Act casts a legal obligation on the state and central governments to execute the fundamental rights of a child (as per Article 21 A of the Constitution). 

• The Act lays down specific standards for the student-teacher ratio, which is a very important concept in providing quality education.
• It also talks about providing separate toilet facilities for girls and boys, having adequate standards for classroom conditions, drinking water facilities, etc.
• The stress on avoiding the urban-rural imbalance in teachers’ posting is important as there is a big gap in the quality and numbers regarding education in the villages compared to the urban areas in the country.
• The Act provides for zero tolerance against the harassment and discrimination of children. The prohibition of screening procedures for admission ensures that there would be no discrimination of children on the basis of caste, religion, gender, etc.
• The Act also mandates that no kid is detained until class 8. It introduced the Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system in 2009 to have grade-appropriate learning outcomes in schools.
• The Act also provides for the formation of a School Management Committee (SMC) in every school in order to promote participatory democracy and governance in all elementary schools. These committees have the authority to monitor the school’s functioning and prepare developmental plans for it.
• The Act is justiciable and has a Grievance Redressal mechanism that permits people to take action when the provisions of the Act are not complied with.
• This provision is included in Section 12(1)(c) of the RTE Act. All schools (private, unaided, aided or special category) must reserve 25% of their seats at the entry level for students from the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) and disadvantaged groups.
• When the rough version of the Act was drafted in 2005, there was a lot of outcry in the country against this large percentage of seats being reserved for the underprivileged. However, the framers of the draft stood their ground and were able to justify the 25% reservation in private schools.
• This provision is a far-reaching move and perhaps the most important step in so far as inclusive education is concerned.
• This provision seeks to achieve social integration.
• The loss incurred by the schools as a result of this would be reimbursed by the central government.
• The Act has increased enrolment in the upper primary level (Class 6-8) between 2009 and 2016 by 19.4%.
• In rural areas, in 2016, only 3.3% of children in the 6 – 14 years bracket were out of school.

Criticism of RTE Act

Even though the RTE Act is a step in the right direction towards the achievement of making education truly free and compulsory in India, it has met with several criticisms. Some of the criticisms are given below:

• The Act was drafted hastily without much thought or consultation being given to the quality of education imparted.
• Children below 6 years are not covered under the Act.
• Many of the schemes under the Act have been compared to the previous schemes on education such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and have been plagued with corruption charges and inefficiency.
• At the time of admissions, many documents such as birth certificate, BPL certificate, etc. are required. This move seems to have left out orphans from being beneficiaries of the Act.
• There have been implementational hurdles in the 25% reservation of seats for EWS and others in private schools. Some of the challenges in this regard are discriminatory behaviour towards parents and difficulties experienced by students to fit in with a different socio-cultural milieu.
• In case a student fails in the annual exam, he/she is given extra training and made to appear for a re-exam. If this re-exam is not passed, the student can be detained in the class. 
• This amendment was made after many states complained that without regular exams, the learning levels of children could not be evaluated effectively. 
• The states which were against this amendment were six states with higher learning outcomes due to their effective implementation of the CCE system as mandated in the Act. (The six states were Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Goa, Telangana and Maharashtra.)
• It has been found that many states find it difficult to move to the CCE system of assessment. This is chiefly due to a lack of teachers’ training and orientation.
• Another criticism levelled against the Act is that instead of increasing the standards and outcomes of the public education system in India, it passes the buck to private schools with some respect.

Making the right to education a fundamental right took more than 6 decades after independence. Now, the government and all stakeholders should focus on the quality of education, and gradually move towards having a single educational system and platform across the country for all sections of society to foster equality, inclusion, and unity.

Kickstart your UPSC 2024   Preparation today!

Right to Education Act (RTE) – Indian Polity:- Download PDF Here

UPSC Questions related to the Right to Education Act (RTE)

What are the basic features of right to education act.

Some of the basic features of the RTE are:

• Free and compulsory education for all children in the age group 6 to 14.
• There will not be any detention or examination until elementary education is completed. However, there has been an amendment to this (as mentioned above in the criticisms of the Act).
• This makes providing education a legal obligation of the governments.
• It also makes it mandatory for all private schools to reserve 25% of their seats for the EWS and disadvantaged groups.

What is the age limit for RTE?

All children between the ages of 6 and 14 have the right to free education under the provisions of the Act.

What is Article 21 of the Constitution?

Article 21 deals with the right to life and personal liberty. It is a fundamental right. To know more click on Right to Life (Article 21) – Indian Polity Notes .

What is the importance of the right to education?

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On the political economy of compulsory education

• Open access
• Published: 24 March 2021
• Volume 134 , pages 1–25, ( 2021 )

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• Alessandro Balestrino   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5841-1588 1 , 2 ,
• Lisa Grazzini 3 &
• Annalisa Luporini 2 , 3  

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We consider an economy with two categories of agents: entrepreneurs and workers. In laissez-faire , the former gain from having their children educated, while the latter, although they may profit from their own education, have no interest in sending their children to school. We first characterise the preferred education policy-cum-redistributive taxation for the two groups, and find that entrepreneurs favour a compulsory education policy while workers prefer a purely redistributive taxation. Each group would like the policy to be entirely financed by the other group. Then, we introduce a political process with probabilistic voting and verify that an equilibrium with both a compulsory education policy and some redistribution may exist in which the workers are constrained but the entrepreneurs, who benefit from hiring educated workers, are not. The redistribution compensates the workers for being constrained by the education policy.

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1 Introduction

It is an historical fact that education policy was conceived in terms of free and mandatory public schooling (financed by public funds) when it was introduced in the West (Germany, France and later UK and US); and free and mandatory schooling is still at the basis of the Western educational systems today. Several motives have been identified for the introduction of compulsory education (Fyfe 2005 ). In Prussia, where such a system was first introduced in 1763, the protestant religious motive seem to have prevailed (on this see also Becker and Woessmann 2010 ). In France and Italy compulsory education laws, dating back to 1881 and 1861 respectively, are mainly seen as a part of the construction of a national state (see also Cipolla 1969 ). In Japan, it was the desire for modernisation that drove the introduction of mandatory schooling after the opening to the West in 1886. Also the UK and the US, by far the most industrialized countries at the time, passed compulsory education laws at the end of the XIX century (1880 in the UK, from 1885 to 1918, depending on the States, in the US); this slight delay might come as a surprise, but a possible reason for it has been identified in the need for cheap child labour—for example, Galor ( 2006 ) suggests that education was made compulsory only when a literate workforce was needed because of technological progress. In that case, parents who may profit from their children’s labour or contribution to home production (Balestrino et al. 2017 ; Cigno 2013 ) may have to be forced to send their kids to school. As far as the US are concerned, Bandiera et al. ( 2018 ) also stress a nation-building motive aimed at instilling civic values to migrants during the “Age of Mass Migration” going from 1850 to 1914—an attempt at building social capital, one might say. Footnote 1

Initially, the length of mandatory schooling and the enforcement of the attendance prescriptions were relatively limited, especially in South European countries, and generally in the countryside where children were seasonally employed in agriculture. After World War II, there has been a steady increase in the length of compulsory education in Western countries. Murtin and Viarengo ( 2011 ) show that there has been a strong convergence in the length of mandatory schooling in fifteen western European countries during the period from 1950 to 2000. At the end of the 1930s, the years of compulsory education ranged from three in Portugal to nine in the UK. After the reforms that occurred in the second half of the XX century, the range was reduced to nine-twelve years. According to Murtin and Viarengo ( 2011 ), this convergence is to be traced to the decreasing returns to educational investments, and to the related fact that all countries had reached approximately the same level of profitability. Nowadays, this convergence is further reinforced by globalisation. Higher competitivity in the global markets can only be faced with a more educated workforce.

In developing countries, however, public and free education is not always guaranteed and thus compulsory education is still an issue today, despite its being one of the main prerequisites not only for economic development but also for democratization and human rights (as an object in itself and as a primary tool in the fight against child labour). Elementary education should be made compulsory according to art. 26 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and such principle has been reaffirmed in a number of conventions and treaties up to Goal 4 of the UNDP Sustainable Development Goals, which calls for achieving inclusive and quality education for all, and more specifically “ensures that all girls and boys complete free primary and secondary schooling by 2030”.

The two motives behind the establishment of compulsory education that we mentioned before, industrialization and generally productivity needs on the one side and nation-building on the other side, are of course not necessarily conflicting with each other. However, when we consider the expansion of compulsory education that took place in Europe after the Second World War, we pointed out above that the productivity motive may have been the main pushing factor. Footnote 2

For these reasons, we focus on the productivity motive, and therefore build a model in which center stage is taken by the actors of the industrial world, entrepreneurs and workers. Footnote 3 Also, we adopt a positive, rather than a normative, viewpoint. It is of course always possible to argue in favour of compulsory education in normative terms, e.g. because of horizontal equity requirements (Balestrino et al. 2017 ). However, normative desirability is not enough to explain why compulsory schooling has become an indispensable part of the modern educational policy package. If we take the political economy view that policies are designed according to voters’ preferences by office- or policy-motivated politicians, then it follows that someone’s interests must be furthered by the presence of a mandatory education period. What we require, therefore, is an argument showing that education policy is likely to be part of a winning policy scheme in a political context. Footnote 4

Specifically, we investigate the question whether there might be a social group who is interested in introducing compulsory schooling as part of the equilibrium policy and is endowed with sufficient political power to actually do so. Footnote 5 In our model, as we said, agents are classified into two occupational groups, entrepreneurs and workers. One of the implications of such a division of society is that entrepreneurs have a stronger interest in education policy than workers. The rationale for this is not that entrepreneurs want their children to be well-educated, because they will tend to provide the required education anyway; the point is that they want the children of their workers to be educated , in order to enjoy a better work-force one generation ahead. For this reason, entrepreneurs favour compulsory schooling, financed by the tax system; such a scheme should then prevail at the political equilibrium if the entrepreneurs are able to impose their preferred policy.

Notice also that the fact that in our model both entrepreneurs and workers have a say on education policy through their voting behaviour is consistent with our focus on the productivity factor, which we saw is presumably the main one behind the more recent introductions or expansions of the compulsory education system. Indeed, universal suffrage was not present in the countries where compulsory education was first introduced (see above): due to their low education and income levels, at the time workers did not have the right to vote. Footnote 6

Additionally, we may remark that the phenomenon of “industrial paternalism” provides some indirect evidence of the fact that entrepreneurs have in the course of history cared for their workers’ education. Industrial paternalism entailed, by and large, the provision on the entrepreneurs’ part of basic health and education services to their workers. This covers a period ranging roughly from 1860 to 1950 and is quite common across different places and cultures: we have examples in Europe (France: Reid 1985 ; Italy: Ciuffetti 2004 ; Finland: Fellman 2019 ; UK: Dellheim 1987 ), in Asia (Japan: Tsutsui 1997 ), in Africa (Belgian Congo, now Democratic Republic of the Congo: Juif 2019 ) as well as in the US (Tone 1997 ). It may be difficult to say what the main rationale for this might have been, possibly a host of different motives (many of which are studied in the references above), but it is undeniable that having a minimally healthy and educated workforce tends to increase productivity – see also fn. 2 and fn. 3. Indeed, it is an established stylised fact that the children of educated parents are more likely to acquire an education (see e.g. Checchi 2005 and the references therein): then, it is plausible to conceive of the entrepreneurs as aware of the potential impact of education on productivity because they see the effects of education on themselves and their children. Instead, workers, not experiencing education first-hand, are less likely to know it as an investment for their children and may easily end up in a vicious circle whereby, generation after generation, they prevent their own offspring from reaping the benefits of having an education. Footnote 7 These are the main reasons why we regard the interpretation of the emergence of compulsory education as a response to productivity requirements as more convincing than alternative explanations such as those based on the presence of a majority of poor workers caring for their children’s welfare and voting for an education system financed by a tax on rich entrepreneurs. Note, however, that the two explanations are not contradictory and that some altruism on the part of the workers may reinforce the effects of the productivity argument.

The paper is structured as follows. Section  2 presents the model and illustrates the nature of the free-market equilibrium, while Sect.  3 introduces the policy instruments and discusses the policy preferences of the agents. Section  4 expounds the political equilibrium achieved via a probabilistic voting process. Finally, Sect.  5 concludes.

2 The model

We consider an overlapping generations economy in which agents live three periods, \(i =0 ,1 ,2.\) In period 0, however, an agent has only a passive role: she receives an education and supplies the time not absorbed by the educational process for the production of a domestically produced service. We refer to agents in period 0 as “children”, in period 1 as “young adults” and in period 2 as “mature adults”. The latter two are the periods where economically relevant decisions are taken and carried out. Agents cease to exist at the end of period 2. For our purposes, then, there are two economically active generations that overlap at each time of the economy, young adults, y , and mature adults, m .

Agents live in households, each made of one parent and one child; in turn, this child will grow up to become a parent; and so on and so forth. There are two social groups, entrepreneurs and workers, who perpetuate themselves generation after generation (no interclass mobility). Footnote 8 Kids are born in period 1, when parents are young adults; in the same period, each parent decides how much education her child should receive. Education requires a money input (out-of-pocket expenditure) as well as a time input (opportunity cost); the time that the kid does not spend in education is combined with the parent’s time and employed to provide a household public good. Notice that it is important to characterize the educational process in such a way that the kid’s time allocation is explicitly accounted for: indeed, it is exactly because parents may wish to rely on their children’s time for the provision of the household public good that they may also wish to reduce or ban altogether school’s attendance. Footnote 9 This is why we model monetary expenditures and time employment as separate inputs in the children’s education.

2.1 Incomes and preferences

There are n entrepreneurs ( n /2 young and n /2 mature adults) resulting in n /2 firms. Entrepreneurs’ incomes are given by the profits generated by the firms they own. The ownership structure is thus specified: each young adult entrepreneur co-owns the firm with her parent, and they share the profits; one period ahead, the same agent, now a mature adult, will share ownership and earnings with her own child (again, this is just for simplicity, and without loss of generality). Monetary earnings are not the only objective of an entrepreneur who also cares about his reputation as a successful manager of the firm. Since the actions of the entrepreneur display part of their effect after the latter’s death, we assume that the entrepreneur will take it into account when making her decisions.

Each firm produces a share of the only good that exists in the economy, whose price is unity. Labour is the only (variable) input and there are constant returns to scale. Each worker supplies a fixed amount of labour, the same for all, and produces \(y^{i} =\underline{y} +y \left( e_{\omega }^{t} ,d_{\omega }^{t}\right)\) units of the good in each productive period ( \(i =1 ,2\) ), where \(\underline{y}\) is the minimum level of production by an uneducated worker, \(e_{\omega }^{t}\) represents the amount of educational expenditure bestowed upon, and \(d_{\omega }^{t}\) denotes the time spent in education by a worker of generation t in period 0 (the total time available is normalized to 1, so that \(1 -d_{\omega }^{t}\) is the time devoted to the production of the household public good). \(y ( \cdot )\) is an increasing and strictly concave function satisfying

that is, both inputs into the educational process are essential in order to produce more than the minimum level, \(\underline{y}\) , and they exhibit technological complementarity: the more time you spend in education, the more effective is the money you spend on it and viceversa (for example, if a kid goes to a high-quality school costing more money, this should make the time spent in education more profitable). Footnote 10 The agent’s non-working time, which is clearly also fixed, is employed in the production of a household public good.

Workers and entrepreneurs bargain over the sharing of output \(y^{i} =\underline{y} +y \left( e_{\omega }^{t} ,d_{\omega }^{t}\right)\) . Let \(\mu\) be the index of the power of the entrepreneurs and \((1 -\mu )\) the index of that of the workers, with \(\mu >0.5\) , i.e. entrepreneurs have higher bargaining power than workers. Each firm incurs in bargaining costs that are increasing in the number of workers. We assume that such costs increase in a discontinuous way (for example because at some point a further increase in the number of employees requires an additional person to carry on the bargaining effort) implying that each firm, anticipating correctly its bargaining costs, employs a fixed number of workers that represents the equilibrium profit-maximizing level of employment. Footnote 11 We denote such level of employment by 2 s , \(s \ge 1\) , where s is both the number of young adult and that of mature adult workers. Footnote 12 Given that there are n /2 firms we globally have \(S =s n \ge n\) employed workers.

The objective of the entrepreneurs is to maximize their share of per-period profit \(\underline{y} +y \left( e_{\omega }^{t} ,d_{\omega }^{t}\right) -w_{\omega }^{i t} -C\) where \(w_{\omega }^{i t}\) represents the per-period wage,and C is the per-worker bargaining cost; while the objective of a worker is to maximize \(w_{\omega }^{i t}\) . We assume (generalized) Nash bargaining and posit i) that the bargaining costs are sunk, because they are borne independently of the bargaining outcome and ii) that bargaining occurs before production costs are incurred: then, the disagreement point is \(( -C ,0)\) Footnote 13 and the wage level will result from the solution of

which yields

Assuming a perfect credit market with zero interest rate, a worker thus earns lifetime income

The per-worker profit in each period will be

Each entrepreneur earns lifetime income

where the subscript \(\eta\) denotes a variable pertaining to an entrepreneur. The lifetime income is given by the sum of the entrepreneur incomes in period 1 and 2, \(w_{\eta }^{1 ,t}\) and \(w_{\eta }^{2 ,t}\) , where

and where \(\alpha\) \(\left( 1 -\alpha \right)\) is the share of earning accruing to a young (mature) adult; \(g ( \cdot )\) is an increasing and concave function converting, for both co-owners of the firm and in each period, the educational inputs received into income—such a function might therefore represent the returns to entrepreneurial ability as mediated by the investments in human capital. Mirroring the preceding assumptions on \(y ( \cdot )\) , we posit

so that both educational expenditure and time spent in education are essential to develop entrepreneurial ability and the two inputs exhibit technological complementarity.

Also mirroring the assumptions made on the workers’ time allocation, we assume that each entrepreneur supplies a fixed amount of time for management, the same for all, and that the remaining fixed leisure time is employed along with the kid’s non-educational time to produce a household public good.

As a final remark, we notice that, given \(\mu\) \(>0.5\) , ( 3 ) and ( 5 ) imply that the worker’s lifetime income is lower than the entrepreneur’s lifetime income:

Turning now to the agents’ preferences, we assume that all agents are selfish. Footnote 14 Neither the workers nor the entrepreneurs derive any direct utility from their children’s education. However, while workers do not derive any indirect utility either, young entrepreneurs derive an indirect advantage from investing in their own children’s education because this positively affects next-period profits—see ( 7 ). Moreover, mature entrepreneurs exhibit a concern for their firm’s future profitability, a “reputational effect”. We choose to focus on this specific element due to our interest in the productivity/industrialisation rationale for educational policy: to keep things simple, we ignore other possible variants like assuming that the parents take pride in their offspring’s education or are worried about the effect of the children’s homework. The impact of the reputational effect on the agents’ voting preferences is discussed in Sect.  4 , where it is made clear that the introduction of such an effect brings about only qualitative changes in the results and that nothing of substance is modified.

Therefore, the workers’ utility function is

where \(f ( \cdot )\) represents the utility from the production of the household public good that we mentioned above. Since the parent’s leisure is fixed, however, we write the sub-utility directly as a function of the kid’s domestic time only, with the provision that \(f \left( 0\right) >0\) —i.e. that only parental time is essential to the production of the household public good.

As to the utility function of the entrepreneurs, it still depends on consumption and on the provision of the household public good. Moreover, we capture the reputational effect by directly introducing a fraction \(\beta\) , \(0<\beta <1\) , of future profits in the utility function:

is the profit generated in the period following the death of the entrepreneur.

We start by describing the laissez-faire economy; government interventions will be considered later on.

2.2 Agent optimisation in a free market

Each worker maximises ( 10 ) by choosing her consumption basket and the composition of her kid’s educational process subject to her lifetime budget constraint

and her child time constraint

plus non-negativity constraints for all the choice variables. Since the educational expenditure for the next generation \(e_{\omega }^{t +1}\) does not appear in the utility function, and the time spent by children in education \(d_{\omega }^{t +1}\) appears as a bad, it is clear that \(e_{\omega }^{t +1} =d_{\omega }^{t +1} =0\) at the optimum for all workers of all generations. Thus, the problem reduces to

where the budget constraint ( 13 ) has been substituted into the utility function. The FOC w.r.t. \(c_{\omega }^{1 ,t}\) is, quite simply,

Workers smooth their consumption over time. Since no worker gains from sending her child to school, however, the workers never get an education.

As for the entrepreneurs, they maximise ( 11 ) subject to their lifetime budget constraint

and their time constraint

Letting \(\lambda\) denote the Lagrange multiplier for the budget constraint, the FOCs w.r.t. \(c_{\eta }^{1 ,t}\) , \(c_{\eta }^{2 ,t}\) , \(e_{\eta }^{t +1}\) , and \(d_{\eta }^{t +1}\) are

respectively, so that the budget allocation is ruled by

Again, consumption will be smoothed over the two periods; however, as far as the entrepreneurs are concerned, each of them gains from having her kid educated, because in the next two periods that kid will own part of the firm, and will contribute her managerial skills to the production process and thus first to the earnings and then to the reputation of the entrepreneur. Therefore, children belonging to this class are educated, and might indeed go to school full-time \((d_{\eta }^{t +1} =1)\) . Notice that the reputational effect ( \(\beta >0\) ) raises the levels of \(e_{\eta }^{t +1}\) and \(d_{\eta }^{t +1}\) but is not necessary for the entrepreneurs to educate their children.

2.3 Characteristics of the free market equilibrium

In the laissez-faire equilibrium, some agents (the entrepreneurs) educate their children while others (the workers) don’t. Notice that the reason why workers are not educated is that educational expenses must be paid by the parent, but the latter does not obtain any return from her child’s education. Not only, but the time devoted to education is subtracted from the production of the household public good. The entrepreneurs, on the contrary, in addition to the gain they get from educating their children, may also take advantage from having an educated work force. This may open the way for policies that oblige parents to send their kids to school.

3 Agent optimisation and policy preferences

In order to investigate whether a compulsory public education policy could gain the support of the majority of voters, we must first assess whether such a measure can actually improve the welfare either of the entrepreneurs, or of the workers or of both categories. As far as the policy tools are concerned, we consider a compulsory education package and a linear income tax/subsidy to be employed both for financing such education measures and for redistributive purposes. We let \(\tau _{\omega }\) and \(\tau _{\eta }\) denote the group-specific marginal income tax rates for workers and entrepreneurs, respectively (possibly negative), Footnote 15 while \(\overline{e}\) represents the minimum expenditure on a child’s education that is imposed upon households and \(\overline{d}\) the minimum amount of time that a child must spend in school. Consequently e and d will now represent the amounts of money and time that are freely allocated to education by households on top of the prescribed levels. Notice that, since the time allocation for the parent is fixed, \(\tau _{\omega }\) and \(\tau _{\eta }\) are not distortionary, and basically equivalent to lump-sum transfers.

3.1 Agent optimisation in the presence of an active policy

Let’s take the workers. Taking into account ( 2 ) and the education policy described above, a worker per-period after tax income obtains as

Further, the worker budget constraint ( 13 ) becomes

where \(\overline{e}\) appears on both sides of the constraint because the policy is publicly financed (either each household receives a subsidy or monetary educational expenses are paid by the government). The time constraint of worker’s child ( 14 ) becomes

Just as in the free-market equilibrium, the additional education expenditure for children \(e_{\omega }^{t +1}\) does not appear in the utility function, and the additional time spent by children in education \(d_{\omega }^{t +1}\) appears as a bad, therefore \(e_{\omega }^{t +1} =d_{\omega }^{t +1} =0\) at the optimum for all workers of all generations. Thus, a worker’s maximization problem reduces to

The FOC w.r.t. \(c_{\omega }^{1 ,t}\) obtains as

i.e. it has the same form as the FOC ( 16 ) obtained in a free market , leading again to consumption smoothing. But now the worker is obliged to have the kid spend \(\overline{d}\) as study time. The worker will also spend \(\overline{e}\) on her child’s education but this would be financed by the tax system.

Let us now consider the entrepreneurs: the entrepreneur’s budget constraint ( 17 ) becomes

Since \(e_{\omega }^{t} =d_{\omega }^{t} =0\) for the reasons given above, we have from ( 6 ) and ( 7 ) that the entrepreneur’s income in period 1, 2, and 3 obtain as follows

Entrepreneurs maximise their utility function

by choice of \(c_{\eta }^{1 ,t} ,~c_{\eta }^{2 ,t} ,~e_{\eta }^{t +1}\) and \(d_{\eta }^{t +1}\) subject to the budget constraint ( 26 ) and the additional time constraint

Since it will become clear in the next subsection that there cannot exist a political equilibrium where both entrepreneurs and workers are constrained, we only consider interior solutions for \(e_{\eta }^{t +1}\) and \(d_{\eta }^{t +1}\) . The FOCs then are

3.2 Policy preferences

We now have to check which of the possible constellations of policy tools is preferred by the agents. Let us begin by writing the government revenue constraint under the assumption that the educational expenditure ration \(\overline{e}\) is paid for by the government:

where we dropped the arguments in \(y^{t},\) \(y^{t -1},\) \(w_{\eta }^{1 ,t}\) and \(w_{\eta }^{2 ,t -1}\) to avoid clutter. For future use, we write the public budget in per-capita terms and we express it in terms of \(\tau _{\omega } (\tau _{\eta } ,\overline{e} ,\overline{d})\) :

where \(\sigma =S/\left( n +S\right)\) and \(\Psi =(1 -\mu ) \left( 2 \underline{y} +y^{t} +y^{t -1}\right)\) . Next, by deriving \(\tau _{\omega } ( \cdot )\) with respect to \(\tau _{\eta }\) , \(\overline{e}\) , and \(\overline{d}\) we obtain

Notice that here the production function is represented as affected by the education level of the parents , \(y^{t}\) , and the grandparents , \(y^{t -1}\) , while the possible increase in education prescribed by the policy would affect the earnings of the children . Similarly the current revenue of the entrepreneurs, \(w_{\eta }^{1 ,t}\) and \(w_{\eta }^{2 ,t -1}\) , is not affected by a change in \(\overline{d}\) . This implies the following

By using ( 38 ), ( 37 ) can be re-written as

Let the indirect utility, written as a function of the policy instruments, be denoted by

where \(\eta _{y}\) denotes a young entrepreneur and \(\eta _{m}\) denotes a mature entrepreneur. The derivatives of ( 40 ) with respect to the policy instruments for the workers are

where again,

as far as the parents’ and grandparents’ income is concerned. Therefore, ( 42 ) and ( 43 ) can be re-written as

Regarding the entrepreneurs, we must distinguish between the young and the mature ones. For the young , the derivative of ( 40 ) with respect to the entrepreneur’s income tax rate obtains as

As to the derivatives with respect to the minimum expenditure on a child’s education, \(\overline{e}\) , and the minimum amount of time a child must spend in school, \(\overline{d}\) , we have

where we have considered that

because education affects only next-period profits. Notice that the per period entrepreneurs’ income is made of four terms – see ( 27 ) and ( 28 ). Since the entrepreneurs are not constrained, the compulsory education policy does not induce any change in returns to period two and three entrepreneurial activity \(\left( 1 -\alpha \right) g\) , but, given ( 4 ), it creates more income via increases in per-worker profits \(\pi ^{2 ,t}\) and \(\left( 1 -\tau _{\eta }\right) \pi ^{3 ,t}\) . This means that we can be certain that

Consequently the sign of the derivatives of ( 47 ) is positive. In fact the policy measure has no impact on the amount of time and money invested in the education of an entrepreneur’s child. The increase in the compulsory components of e and d will be counterbalanced by a reduction of the same amount in the time and money used to top up the compulsory amounts. As a consequence the entrepreneurs will benefit from the increase of the education of their work-force without incurring in any distortion of their own educational choices.

The mature entrepreneurs will incur in the cost of education without obtaining any monetary return, but obtaining instead a benefit in terms of reputation. The reputational effect, therefore, is key to make them favour an educational policy, in that it makes them care, indirectly, for the workers’ children’s education one generation ahead. Qualitatively, this works just as if we assumed that the mature entrepreneurs had become altruistic (which, as we mentioned in fn. 14 would still be compatible with our results); the interpretation as an interest in the reputation of the firm is however more in line with our basic assumptions. While helpful, it is not absolutely necessary to obtain our main result (the interest in workers’ education of the young entrepreneurs would be enough), and it allows us to show the entrepreneurs as being consistently in support of mandatory education rather than moving away from that support in old age, which seems to sit comfortably with a view of the entrepreneur as having a long-term interest in the family business.

For them, the derivatives of ( 40 ) with respect to \(\tau _{\eta }\) , \(\overline{e}\) , and \(\overline{d}\) obtain as

We are now in a position to calculate the preferred policy by each group. Specifically, the preferred policies can be found by using ( 34 ) to replace \(\tau _{\omega }\) in ( 40 ) and then choosing \(\tau _{\eta } ,~\overline{e}\) and \(\overline{d}\) so as to maximise:

for the workers and the entrepreneurs, respectively, under non-negativity constraints for \(\overline{e}\) and \(\overline{d}\) and the constraints that

For the workers, the FOCs are:

implying that the optimal tax rate is \(\tau _{\eta } =1\) while \(\overline{e}\) and \(\overline{d}\) should be optimally set to zero.

For the young entrepreneurs, the FOCs are:

The FOCs for the mature ones are instead:

We know from our previous analysis that in this case both \(\partial V_{\eta _{y}}/ \partial \overline{e}\) and \(\partial V_{\eta _{y}}/ \partial \overline{d}\) are positive because of a positive indirect effect as the compulsory education policy creates more income via increases in the after-tax per-worker next-period profits \(\left( 1 -\tau _{\eta }\right) \pi ^{2 ,t}\) —see ( 47 )—and because of the positive reputational effect. The latter is also present in the case of the mature entrepreneurs.

Therefore, the entrepreneurs would prefer to face a zero marginal tax rate while at the same time having positive values for \(\overline{e}\) and \(\overline{d}\) (indeed, entrepreneurs would always favour pushing each ration to its upper limit). This implies that the workers should face a positive tax rate in order to finance education expenditure. The upper limit for \(\overline{d}\) is clearly unity, while for \(\overline{e}\) can be deduced from observing that, given the preferred tax rates, the maximum level of \(\overline{e}\) can be achieved when \(\tau _{\omega } (\tau _{\eta } ,\overline{e} ,\overline{d}) =1,\) implying \(\overline{e} =(1 -\mu ) \left( 2 \underline{y} +y^{t} +y^{t -1}\right) \sigma\) .

While the results are possibly too sharp to be taken literally, their qualitative interpretation is clear: the workers do not perceive any benefit from compulsory education but would favour a redistributive income taxation, whereas entrepreneurs gain from compulsory education but would like to shift the entire cost on the workers.

4 Political equilibrium

Let us now focus on the voting process through which an educational policy package is chosen in the political arena. To perform our analysis, we consider a probabilistic voting model with a two-candidate electoral competition—see e.g. Lindbeck and Weibull ( 1987 ). In this setup, candidates are uncertain on whether citizens will participate in voting: they could abstain, maybe because they cannot clearly perceive the distance between the proposed platforms. Consequently, the candidates are uncertain on how citizens will vote for any given political proposal. Following a standard approach, we suppose that the voters’ decisions depend on the differences in the expected utilities from the candidates’ different platforms, and that the candidates perceive the probability that a voter will participate in voting and support a platform as a function of the distance between her own platform and that proposed by the rival candidate. Politicians are assumed to be opportunistic, i.e. they are purely office-motivated, and thus aim at maximising their vote share. No credibility issues may arise, because it is also assumed that politicians can make binding commitments to policy platforms proposed during the electoral campaign. Footnote 16

To sum up, the sketch of the electoral procedure is thus the following. Two candidates simultaneously propose their policy platforms, that is their educational policy packages plus their redistributive policy platform. Then, citizens vote for their preferred candidate. Finally, the elected candidate implements the policy she promised during the electoral campaign.

Each candidate selects her policy platform in order to maximise her share of total votes, that depends on the probabilities that each voter will vote for her, taking the rival candidate platform as given. Now, let the probability perceived by candidate \(j ,~j =A ,B\) that an agent votes for her be \(\gamma _{\iota }^{j} ,~\iota =\omega ,\eta _{y} ,\eta _{m}\) , where we distinguish between young and mature entrepreneurs because they have different policy preferences. Footnote 17 The expected vote share of a candidate will then be:

As usual, we posit

where \(\Gamma _{\iota }\) is a smooth, continuous and increasing function varying between 0 and 1, and we use the superscript j , \(j =A ,B\) , to denote a policy variable proposed by candidate j .

The assumption that agents will show up at elections with a certain positive probability is of course standard in probabilistic voting models; also standard is it to assume that this probability varies with the agent’s type and, more precisely, that each individual’s voting behaviour is affected by her own ideological attachment to a party (usually represented by an idiosyncratic taste shock which is a random variable with a density function taken to be symmetric around zero). However, we wish to highlight here a different mechanism, namely the positive relationship between income and voting participation: active participation in public life, including active voting, is indeed usually found to be positively related to income at the individual level and, relatedly, negatively associated with income inequality at the aggregate level—see for example Greene and Nikolaev ( 1999 ), Benabou ( 2000 ), and Horn ( 2011 ). Footnote 18

Therefore, we assume that the probability of an individual participating in voting is positively related to her income. In our framework, this means that the entrepreneurs are more active than workers in the voting process, i.e. their abstention probability is lower. We take it that \(\Gamma _{w} ( \Delta V_{\iota }) <\Gamma _{\eta _{k}} ( \Delta V_{\iota })\) \(k =y ,m,\) for any value of the difference in the utility from the two platforms.

Each candidate maximises ( 63 ) by choosing her own policy platform \(\tau _{\eta }^{j} ,\overline{e}^{j} ,\overline{d}^{j}\) while taking the other candidate’s platform as given; in a Nash equilibrium in which the candidates announce their policies simultaneously, the resulting equilibrium policies will be identical. As is well-known, then, the objective function of a candidate, that is ( 63 ), in a probabilistic voting model coincides with a generalised utilitarian social welfare function—see Mueller ( 2003 ).

In what follows, we will assume that for the income tax rate proposed by candidate j for entrepreneurs, \(\tau _{\eta }^{j}\) , we always have interior solutions at the political equilibrium. In other words we assume that the abstention rate of the workers (who outnumber the entrepreneurs) is such as to guarantee an interior solution. Footnote 19 As far as the education package is concerned, notice that there cannot exist an equilibrium in which both the workers and the entrepreneurs are constrained. If that were the case, one of the candidates could easily improve the outcome for both groups by simultaneously reducing the ration and the tax rates. For each candidate, the FOCs are:

where the derivatives of the indirect utility functions w.r.t. the policy parameters are given by ( 54 )–( 56 ) and ( 57 )–( 59 ).

Substituting for \(\partial V_{\omega }/ \partial \tau _{\eta }^{j}\) and \(\partial V_{\eta _{k}}/ \partial \tau _{\eta }^{j},\) \(k =y ,m,\) from the preferred policies ( 54 )–( 56 ), condition ( 65 ) becomes:

In words, the marginal tax rates are set so as to equalise the marginal utilities of income weighted by the sensitivity of the two citizen types’ vote to the candidate’s proposal at the equilibrium point, Footnote 20 that is when there is no difference in the proposed platforms (see Mueller 2003 , ch. 12). Since the candidates’ proposed policies are identical at the equilibrium, \(\tau _{\eta }^{A} =\tau _{\eta }^{B} =\tau _{\eta }\) , \(\overline{e}^{A} =\overline{e}^{B} =\overline{e}\) , and \(\overline{d}^{A} =\overline{d}^{B} =\overline{d}\) .

The intuition behind these results is the following. Let us suppose, for example, that \(\partial \Gamma _{\eta _{k}}/ \partial V_{\eta _{k}},\) \(k =y ,m,\) is, for any given value of the difference between the utilities in ( 64 ), larger than \(\partial \Gamma _{\omega }/ \partial V_{\omega }\) , meaning that entrepreneurs respond with a higher increase in the probability of voting for the candidate if the latter marginally differentiates her proposed platform in their favour; then, \(\tau _{\eta }\) will be set in such a way that the marginal utility of income for the entrepreneurs, \(\lambda\) , is lower than the marginal utility of income for the workers, \(v^{ \prime }\) . That is, the policy favours the citizen whom the candidate perceives as more likely to vote for her as a consequence of such a favour. Footnote 21

In ( 68 ) we consider interior solutions for \(\tau _{\eta }.\) Notice, however, that the characteristics of the solution depend on the abstention rate of the workers. Considering that there are more workers than entrepreneurs, in general \(\tau _{\omega }\) cannot be positive unless the workers’ abstention rate is particularly high even for large differences in the utility they can obtain from the two candidates’ platforms,

The educational policy must usually be paired with a redistributive taxation in favour of the workers because the latter suffer from a reduction in the household public good. This scenario can arise if the entrepreneurs’ benefits coming from the workers’ education are sufficiently high to compensate both the cost of the compulsory education package and the redistributive policy. Clearly, such a cost would be lower if the workers attached positive value to their children’s education. In that case, less redistribution would be needed for the workers to accept the compulsory education policy. If education were highly valued by the workers, the equilibrium policy could even prescribe positive values for \(\tau _{\omega }\) .

When workers do not attach any value to their children’s education, substituting ( 55 ), ( 58 ), and ( 61 ) into condition ( 66 ) and ( 56 ), ( 59 ), and ( 62 ) into condition ( 67 ), the two conditions can be re-written as

Further, substituting ( 65 ), the above equations can be re-written as

On the l.h.s. of ( 72 ) we have a measure of the marginal benefit of educational expenditure, for the young and the mature entrepreneurs weighted by the respective vote sensitivities to the candidates’ proposals; on the RHS, we have the weighted marginal cost, expressed in utility terms for \(\overline{e}\) . Similarly on the l.h.s. of ( 73 ) we have a measure of the weighted marginal benefit of school time while on the RHS we have the weighted marginal cost expressed as an opportunity cost for \(\overline{d}.\)

Then, as long as marginal benefits exceed or equal marginal costs, a solution in which a certain level of compulsory education is enforced emerges. We have then the interesting result that a compulsory education policy may be implemented at the political equilibrium, despite the fact that one of the two groups of which the society is composed would not educate the children in a free-market equilibrium. The driving force behind this result is the fact that the entrepreneurs gain from having an educated workforce.

The reputational effect plays a role in this respect, by making mature entrepreneurs care about future profits and thus value workers’ education, but it is by no means necessary to achieve our general result. In the absence of such effect (i.e. for \(\beta =0\) ), the l.h.s. of ( 72 ) and ( 73 ) would be lower yielding lower equilibrium levels for \(\overline{e}\) and \(\overline{d}\) . The benefit of the policy would be enjoyed only by young entrepreneurs implying a milder policy in case the equilibrium exists and a lower probability of existence of an equilibrium with the above characteristics but the general conclusion would be unaffected.

5 Conclusions

Over the years, there have been several contributions to the political economy of education. However, their focus seems to have been mostly on secondary or tertiary education. Also, typically, the main driving force behind the results has been the presence of income dispersion. Consider for example, the work by Epple and Romano ( 1996b ). In their model, a publicly provided private good, which could be education, is financed through a flat-rate income tax and policy is determined by majority rule; agents differ by their fixed incomes. At the political equilibrium, the private good is publicly provided as long as it is possible to top it up; interestingly, for some preference configurations, the political equilibrium is of the “ends-against-the-middle” variety, i.e. low- and high-income agents favour low levels of public provision whereas the middle-income agents favour high levels of public provision (see also Epple and Romano 1996a ). Another well-established result is that post-compulsory education policies are at least partially regressive, redistributing income from the lower income groups to middle- and high income groups (see e.g. Fernandez and Rogerson 1995 ).

We have taken a different route here, paying attention specifically to the question whether education should be made compulsory or not. We considered an economy with two categories of agents: entrepreneurs and workers. The type of occupation, rather than the income dispersion, plays a crucial role in the analysis. In laissez-faire , the former gain from having their children educated, while the latter have no interest in sending their children to school. We characterised the preferred education policy-cum-redistributive taxation for the two groups, and find that entrepreneurs favour a compulsory education policy while workers prefer a purely redistributive taxation scheme (in both cases, the policy should preferably be financed entirely by the other group). Then, we introduced a political process with probabilistic voting and verified that an equilibrium with both a compulsory education policy and some redistribution may exist in which the workers are constrained but the entrepreneurs, who benefit from hiring educated workers, are not.

We should note that, on top of establishing a political economy rationale for compulsory schooling based on the intuition that due to a productivity reason entrepreneurs care for education more than workers, our model shows also that it must co-exist with a (limited) redistribution policy. In particular, the model allows to make the point that a certain amount of redistribution is needed to compensate the workers for the fact that they are forced to “over-educate” their kids. This kind of perspective on redistribution could only be achieved, we believe, within the structure of the present model.

To the best of our knowledge, the literature on this topic, at least if we consider the political economy line of work, is limited. Most papers follows different approaches from ours. As an example of these alternative views, consider the contribution by Gradstein ( 2000 ), whose elegant argument is based on the idea of time inconsistency. He argues that private financing of education can be an inferior public choice if the current government representing the parents is unable to pre-commit the next generation to a restrained redistributive policy. He observes that public education, relative to private education, generates a more equal income distribution for the children, and therefore suggests that in the future the government will have to implement a relatively moderate redistributive policy, as chosen by the median voter. This reduces the incentive to under-invest in the children’s education, incentive that instead would be large in case the parents expected a more aggressive redistribution policy. Thus, human capital should be accumulated at a faster pace under a public education regime, and this would make it preferable for a majority of parents to the alternative of a private education regime. Another interesting example of a paper in the same vein is Correa et al. ( 2020 ), where the political support for different education funding regimes in a one-person, one-vote system is studied. Free education, in which all pupils are treated equally (the same amount of resources is spent on each of them) turns out to be the Condorcet winner. This is because, in economies with some degree of income inequality, any other system concentrates the educational expenditure in some way, either favouring the richest families or those with the smartest kids, and therefore, lacks majority support. This provides a political economy explanation for the observation that governments tend to favor free education for all students (i.e., to spend the same amount on each student).

Clearly, ours is an entirely different line of reasoning, not in contradiction, but certainly based on other foundations and moreover focused specifically on whether education should be made compulsory or not, rather than on whether it should be financed by the State or not (which is of course a somewhat different issue). In our model, income disparity plays a part, in particular by supporting the assumption that entrepreneurs are not constrained by compulsory education, but what really drives our result on the desirability of compulsory education at the political equilibrium is the difference in occupation, i.e. the different role that education plays for the entrepreneurs as opposed to the workers because of the industrialization/productivity reason we have mentioned in the Introduction. Redistribution, however, by compensating workers for the loss of their children’s production, plays a role in that it makes workers accept the presence of compulsory education at the political equilibrium.

That there is a correlation between education and social and political participation is a well established result. In particular Dee ( 2004 ) and Milligan et al. ( 2004 ) point out a causal effect from education to participation in voting and civic engagement for the US.

According to Galor and Moav ( 2006 ), the productivity motive was also crucial to favour education reforms in the Western world during the process of the Industrial Revolution when a shift towards more skill-intensive production processes occurred. In particular, they provide evidence suggesting that, during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, physical capital was the fundamental resource for economic growth while, during the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, the increasing importance of human capital in production induced the capitalist elite to support the provision of public education. Further support to such a view has been recently provided by Squicciarini ( 2020 ) for France during the Second Industrial Revolution. In particular, she shows how the type of primary education, and specifically, the introduction of a more technical curriculum was key for promoting a more skilled labour force, and thus for economic development.

Main actors may change depending on the historical period. For example, by focussing on the Industrial Revolution period, Galor and Moav ( 2006 ) and Galor et al. ( 2009 ) point out a different conflict of interests between two types of economic elite: the landowners who were interested in decreasing the mobility of the rural workers and thus were not in favour of their education, and the industrialists who instead needed educated workers and supported educational policies for the masses.

Our focus in the present paper will be on the compulsory nature of the system. As for its subsidisation, the literature on public finance points out the role that subsidies may play in remeding the distortion in individual educational decisions due to the introduction of income taxation (see e.g. Bovenberg and Jacobs 2005 ).

See Bourguignon and Verdier ( 2000 ) for a paper showing under which conditions a minority oligarchic group may have an incentive to subsidise the education of the poors who are the majority in the society, and thus to favour the emergence of a middle class as well as a democratic transition. On the other hand, Naito and Nishida ( 2017 ) distinguish between primary and higher education and show that different patterns may emerge, depending on the amount of human capital of the median voter. Higher education is supported only if the majority of individuals accumulate sufficient human capital. If this is the case, however, a relatively high amount of public resources may be directed to higher education resulting in persistent high income inequality because the poor do not enrol in university.

However, as we shall see, we assume that the probability of participation is lower for workers; therefore the historical case could be seen as a limiting one theoretically. Also, it is interesting to note that in several countries mandatory schooling and universal suffrage were simultaneously introduced (Brazil: 1988; South Korea: 1948; India: 1950).

This may be one of the reasons why the length of compulsory education is found to be a predictor of actual education some 40 years later when the choices of educated parents display their effect on their children’s education (Murtin and Viarengo 2011 ).

This assumption simplifies our analysis and allows us to focus on the productivity reason behind the political choice on a compulsory educational policy. Should the model be developed in a dynamic set-up, interclass mobility would be crucial to capture the emergence of a more complex social framework (e.g. growth of a middle class, shares in ownership of means of production by workers, etc.).

Alternatively, the kids could be employed in a form of market work—the logic of the model would be the same although there would be a further layer of complexity.

The assumption that both time and money are essential to obtain an education outcome is crucial for our analysis. In fact, it would be impossible that one could get educated devoting no time to such activity and using no resources. Complementarity between d and e ,  on the contrary, is not necessary to obtain our results but, in addition to being a reasonable assumption, it is technically convenient (it simplifies the analysis by ensuring that the agent’s problem is well-behaved). Given that both time and money are essential inputs however, we would obtain qualitatively analogous results in case d and e were either independent or substitute in the \(y ( \cdot )\) function.

In other words, we assume that the marginal bargaining cost in equilibrium is higher than the profit obtainable by employing an additional worker.

This is of course just an innocuous simplification; the model works with any share of young to mature adults employed in each firm.

This can be interpreted as meaning that the bargaining costs of the worker are normalised to zero.

This is of course an extreme assumption, and we adopt it mainly because it simplifies the reasoning quite radically. It has to be remembered, however, that while the verdict on whether altruism or egoism prevails within a family is possibly still open, the assumption of egoism seems to be more robust to empirical scrutiny (see e.g. Cigno et al. 1998 , 2006 ). Moreover, our results would carry over to a setting with altruism, as long as the market equilibrium yields a less-than-optimal amount of acquired education, and Balestrino et al. ( 2017 ) show that even with full altruism there can be inefficiency in the provision of education due to comparative advantage issues.

The model cannot be applied to the case of a single income tax rate, because, as we shall see, the key mechanism driving the agents’ policy preferences is the desire of each group to shift the tax burden on the other group while retaining the benefit of the public expenditure. However, the case we consider here is more relevant, we believe, because, as the gross incomes of the two groups are different (see ( 9 )), it becomes a rough representation of a two-bracket income tax system - therefore, it approximates more closely real-world tax systems.

Notice that, since politicians are office- rather than policy-motivated, it does not matter whether they are workers or entrepreneurs. It would of course matter if we were to take the route of the so-called citizen-candidate models - see e. g. Osborne and Slivinski ( 1996 ) and Besley and Coate ( 1997 ).

We assume that the probability of voting is the same within each social group. The model could be extended to the case where the probability varies within each group for example because of an individual bias towards one of the candidates. If we adhere to the common assumption that biases are uniformely distributed, then the formal structure of our model continues to hold (see fn. 21).

Political economy models in line with this literature include Anderberg and Balestrino ( 2007 ), where the probability of abstension has been linked to the level of income, and Bourguignon and Verdier ( 2000 ), where the turnout in elections is determined by the level of education.

Corner solutions with \(\tau _{\eta }^{j} =1,\) \(\tau _{\omega }^{j} <0\) are implausible in a democracy (as well as those with \(\tau _{\eta }^{j} =0,\) \(\tau _{\omega }^{j} >0\) ).

Notice, however, that for the entrepreneurs the term in square bracket is the average of the sensitivity of the young and the mature ones.

In the case where the voting probability varies within each social group because of a uniformly distributed individual bias towards one of the candidates, the sensitivity \(\partial \Gamma _{\iota }/ \partial V_{\iota }\) represents the height of the distribution. Such height will be higher, the lower is the range over which the bias is distributed. Consequently, the sensitivity is higher the more concentrated is the distribution, implying that the policy will favour the group whose probability of voting is less dispersed (see Mueller 2003 , ch. 12).

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Balestrino, A., Grazzini, L. & Luporini, A. On the political economy of compulsory education. J Econ 134 , 1–25 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00712-021-00735-x

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Right To Free and Compulsory Education (RTE, Act-2009) in India-A Critical Analysis

2019, Delhi Publication

The title of the RTE act incorporates the words 'free and compulsory'. 'Free education' means that no child, other than a child who has been admitted by his or her parents to a school which is not supported by the appropriate Government, shall be liable to pay any kind of fee or charges or expenses which may prevent him or her from pursuing and completing elementary education. 'Compulsory education' casts an obligation on the appropriate Government and local authorities to provide and ensure admission, attendance and completion of elementary education by all children in the 6-14 age groups. With this, India has moved forward to a rights based framework that casts a legal obligation on the Central and State Governments to implement this fundamental child right as enshrined in the Article 21A of the Constitution, in accordance with the provisions of the RTE Act.

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Being a welfare state, we cannot afford to take risk in educating our citizen. India is home to 19% of the world's children. India also has one-third of the world's illiterate population, which is a worrisome trend. Each and every citizen of India has been mandated by our constitution to receive free & compulsory education up to elementary level without any discrimination. Apart from constitutional remedies, various other efforts have been made to champion the cause of ‗Education for All'. However, despite best of efforts, education for all could not become a reality. The Government of India (GoI), in its effort to provide education for all, took further serious and bold steps by way of making education a fundamental right (FR). This was possible by amendment of constitution in the light of Hon'ble Supreme Court judgement (1993) to make education as FR and making of right to education a FR (the 86 th constitutional amendment). Despite best of possible efforts, we are yet to provide our population a compulsory education (in an inclusive and enabling setting). Condition of PWDs is indeed very pathetic on international parameters. There are many hindrances which sabotage the efforts of our government and in the future amendments, this need to be addressed. Present paper tries to trace the origin, feature, drawbacks, its effect and possible amendments.

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After crossing many barriers, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 (RTE Act) was passed by the Indian Parliament on 4 August 2009 and came into force on 1 April 2010. It provides free and compulsory elementary education to children in the 6–14 age bracket. The new statute makes it obligatory for state governments and local bodies to ensure that every child receives an education in a neighbourhood school. The Act&#39;s implementation should directly benefit close to ten million children who do not go to school at present. However, the RTE Act will face many challenges. The Herculean task for the government will be to provide basic requirements like books, classrooms, infrastructure and qualified and trained teachers. Further, huge financial support from and a tremendous involvement from citizens will be required. Discussed here are various provisions of the Act and suggestions on some policy measures to help achieve targets.

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shravanthi suresh

Pramati Educational and Cultural Trust & Ors v. Union of India was a petition taken up by the Supreme Court, as a reference made by a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court by a decision in 2010 in the case of Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan versus Union of India. The Apex Court’s decision by a constitution bench comprising of Chief Justice R.M.Lodha, Justice A.K.Patnaik, Justice Sudhansu Jyoti Mukhopadhaya, Justice Dipak Misra and Justice Fakkir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla on the the Right to Education came out last week, after which, schools run by minority communities inclusive of aided or unaided minority institutions no longer have to oblige to the provision of the RTE Act where in, one had to reserve a minimum of 25% seats for the backward community/ classes. The RTE Act is still held to be Constitutionally valid, but such “minority schools” are no longer obliged to follow the same. On the other hand, private unaided institutions are not exempted as there was no violation of their right under 19(1)(g). For one to be exempted, one has to fall under the category of “Minority Institution”. Stating that minorities have the constitutional right to run and administer educational institutes, the five-judge bench said Parliament could not alter these rights under its powers of Article 21A. The RTE Act mandated all schools to admit at least 25% students from the economically weaker sections of society. The Bench upheld the validity of the RTE Act and also for reservation of the SC/ST and OBC in all Educational institutions except minority institutions. The court said: "We hold that the Constitution (Ninety-Third Amendment) Act, 2005 inserting Clause (5) of Article 15 of the Constitution and the Constitution (Eighty-Sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 inserting Article 21A of the Constitution do not alter the basic structure or framework of the Constitution and are constitutionally valid." "We accordingly hold that none of the rights under articles 14, 19(1)(g) and 21 of the Constitution have been abrogated by Clause (5) of Article 15 of the Constitution and we hold that the (Ninety-third Amendment) Act, 2005 of the Constitution inserting clause (5) of Article 15A of the Constitution is valid," the court said. One may state that the fundamental right to Education was given to the minorities in order to ensure that the rights of these minorities are protected and promoted, but the practice today is something else, as majority of the students studying in the minority schools belong to majority groups, even the few minority group children are generally from the upper strata of the society. Further, these minority schools charge a big number as tuition fees which itself fails the very purpose of such a minority group institution in itself. These institutions are more of a business/ money making idea than an institution to provide and impart knowledge and education, and thus by imparting knowledge not being the key reason behind its existence, these minority institutions defeat the original intention of the Constitution. "

SANTOSH PAL

The importance of education cannot be denied in one’s life. It sustains the human values which contribute to the individual and collective well-being. The Right to Education Act (RTE), 2009 is undoubtedly one of the landmark regulations in the education sector in republic India. It aimed at providing momentum to India’s vision of making education compulsory for all. The RTE Act attempts to provide every child, between the age group of 6-14 years, the right to quality and equitable elementary education in a formal school. It focuses on educational inputs – infrastructure, teachers, and books etc. It is related to public interest so attention needs to be paid to assessing its impact on learning outcomes. This study attempts critical appraisal of the implementation of RTE Act 2009 in Parishadiya Vidyalayas of country. The study will also explore the steps taken by states for implementation of RTE Act, 2009 so far and their difficulties in proper implementation of the Act. The key point...

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The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act or Right to Education Act (RTE), is an Act of the Parliament of India enacted on 4 August 2009, which describes the modalities of the importance of free and compulsory education for children between 6 and 14 in India under Article 21A of the Indian Constitution. India became one of 135 countries to make education a fundamental right of every child when the act came into force on 1 April 2010. The Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002 inserted Article 21-A in the Constitution of India to provide free and compulsory education of all children in the age group of six to fourteen years as a Fundamental Right in such a manner as the State may, by law, determine. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which represents the consequential legislation envisaged under Article 21-A, means that every child has a right to full time elementary education of satisfactory and equitable quality in a formal school which satisfies certain essential norms and standards.

On April 1, 2010, India joined the league of over 130 countries that have made legal commitments to provide free and compulsory education. The Right to Education (RTE) Act, 2009 ensures ‘Education For All’ in terms of free and compulsory elementary education for children aged form six to fourteen years. Despite the fact that the Act does not address the critical foundation years fo children below the age of six years, it have been welcomed as a critical first step. Free and compulsory elementary education was made a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution in December 2002, by the 86th Amendment. To quickly recap the recent steps in the journey of the RTE Act 2009: the 86th Amendment Act, 2002, made three specific provisions in the Constitution to facilitate the realization of free and compulsory education to children between the age of six and fourteen years as a Fundamental Right. These were (i) adding Article 21 A in Part III (Fundamental Rights), (ii) modifying Article 45, and (iii) adding a new clause (k) under Article 51 A (Fundamental duties), making the parents or guardian responsible for providing opportunities for education to their children between six and fourteen years. In translating this into action, the ‘Right of Children to Free and compulsory Education Bill’ was drafted in 2005. This was revised and became an Act in August 2009, but was not notified for roughly seven months. After much dithering for almost seven years subsequent to the 86th Amendment to the Constitution, the RTE Act 2009 received presidential assent on 26th August 2009 and came into force form, April 1, 2010, taking forward the agenda of free and universal elementary education.

MGIRED Journal

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Education is an essential human right which must be provided to all for the sustainable development of the nation. It enhances the productivity of the citizens and thus is directly linked to the welfare of the people. In India, Education is controlled by the Union Government and the states, with some responsibilities lying with the Union and the states having autonomy for others. Most of the universities in India are controlled by the Union or State Government. Article 21-A of the Indian Constitution casts a duty upon the State to provide Free Compulsory Education to children in the age group of 6-14 years, 'as the State may, by law, determine'. Therefore, time to time a demand has been raised for a law to ensure the Free Compulsory Education in India. Though several Central and state level attempts have been taken towards this end. The Sarva Shikhsa Abhiyan (SSA) is one of the successful attempts. The last of such attempts resulted in the "Right to Education Act (RTE) 2009" which declares education is a fundamental right for all.

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Why early childhood care and education matters

The right to education begins at birth.

But new UNESCO data shows that 1 out of 4 children aged 5 have never had any form of pre-primary education. This represents 35 million out of 137 million 5-year-old children worldwide. Despite research that proves the benefits of early childhood care and education (ECCE), only half of all countries guarantee free pre-primary education around the world.

UNESCO’s World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education taking place in Tashkent, Uzbekistan on 14-16 November 2022 will reaffirm every young child’s right to quality care and education, and call for increased investment in children during the period from birth to eight years.  

Here’s what you need to know what early childhood care and education.

Why is early childhood care and education important?

The period from birth to eight years old is one of remarkable brain development for children and represents a crucial window of opportunity for education. When children are healthy, safe and learning well in their early years, they are better able to reach their full developmental potential as adults and participate effectively in economic, social, and civic life. Providing ECCE is regarded as a means of promoting equity and social justice, inclusive economic growth and advancing sustainable development.

A range of research and evidence has converged to support this claim. First, neuroscience has shown that the environment affects the nature of brain architecture – the child’s early experiences can provide either a strong or a fragile foundation for later learning, development and behaviours. Second, the larger economic returns on investment in prior-to-school programmes than in programmes for adolescents and adults has been demonstrated. Third, educational sciences have revealed that participation in early childhood care and education programmes boosts children’s school readiness and reduces the gap between socially advantaged and disadvantaged children at the starting gate of school.

From a human rights perspective, expanding quality early learning is an important means for realizing the right to education within a lifelong learning perspective. ECCE provides a significant preparation to basic education and a lifelong learning journey. In 2021, only 22% of United Nations Member States have made pre-primary education compulsory, and only 45% provide at least one year of free pre-primary education. Only 46 countries have adopted free and compulsory pre-primary education in their laws.

How has access to ECCE evolved?

Overall, there has been significant global progress in achieving inclusive and high-quality ECCE. Globally, the ratio for pre-primary education has increased from 46% in 2010 to 61% in 2020. The global ratio for participation in organized learning one year before the official primary school entry age also increased to reach 75% in 2020. However, in low- and lower-middle-income countries, fewer than two in three children attend organized learning one year before the official primary entry age.  Furthermore, the proportion of children receiving a positive and stimulating home environment remains significantly low with only 64% of children having positive and nurturing home environments. Great regional disparities remain the biggest challenges. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 40% of children have experienced a positive and stimulating home learning environment compared to 90% of children in Europe and Northern America.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted ECCE?

The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating effect on ECCE and amplified its crisis. Young children have been deemed the greatest victims of the pandemic, experiencing the impact of on their immediate families, and because of stay-at-home orders of lockdowns, having been deprived of essential services to promote their health, learning and psychosocial well-being. Some children will start basic education without organized learning experiences to the detriment of their readiness for school. It was estimated that the closure of ECCE services has resulted in 19 billion person-days of ECCE instruction lost with 10.75 million children not being able to reach their developmental potential in the first 11 months of the pandemic.

What are the consequences on foundational learning?

ECCE is a pre-requisite for meeting the right to learn and to develop. In particular, access to pre-primary education is a basis for acquiring foundational learning including literacy, numeracy and socio-emotional learning. Yet, according to the recent estimate, about 64% of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story at age 10. The roots of this learning poverty start in ECCE and its lack of capacity to make children ready for school.

What is the situation regarding ECCE teachers and care staff?

As the calls grow for higher quality ECCE provision, teacher shortages and quality has received increasing attention. The number of teachers who received at least the minimum pedagogical teacher training, both pre-service and in-service, increased from 68% to 80% between 2010 and 2020. It is estimated that ECCE services need another 9.3 million full-time teachers to achieve the SDG target . Most Member States have established qualification requirements for ECCE teachers, while far less attention has been focused on ECCE teachers’ working conditions and career progression. The low social status, poor salaries and job insecurity of ECCE teachers and care staff tend to have an adverse impact on attracting and retaining suitably qualified early childhood educators.

What are the policies, governance and financing implications?

It is time for societies and governments to implement relevant policies to recover and transform their ECCE systems. ECCE is seen by many countries as a key part of the solution to a myriad of challenges including social inclusion and cohesion, economic growth and to tackle other sustainable development challenges. According to the 2022 Global Education Monitoring Report, 150 out of 209 countries have set targets for pre-primary education participation by 2025 or 2030. The proportion of countries that monitor participation rates in pre-primary education is expected to increase from 75% in 2015 to 92% in 2025 and 95% in 2030. It is expected that the pre-primary participation rate for all regions will exceed 90% by 2030. In Central and South Asia, East and South-East Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, participation rates are expected to be nearly 100%. At the same time, it is projected that participation rates in Northern Africa and Western Asia will be about 77% by 2030.

What are the obstacles to ensuring access to quality ECCE?

• Policy fragmentation: In many countries, ECCE policies and services are fragmented and do not leverage whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches to addressing the holistic needs and rights of families and their young children. This is particularly challenging for national governments with limited resources, low institutional capacities and weak governance.
• Lack of public provision : Non-state provision of ECCE continues to grow in many contexts, and the role of non-state actors in influencing policy development and implementation is evident. Non-state actors provide a large proportion of places in pre-primary education. In 2000, 28.5% of pre-primary aged children were enrolled in private institutions, and this rose to 37% in 2019, a figure higher than for primary (19%) or secondary (27%) education.
• Insufficient regulation of the sector : Specific regulations and standards for ECCE are not in place in most countries. Regulations usually do not establish quality assurance mechanisms and those that do, tend not to focus on outcomes.
• Chronic underfunding : An average of 6.6% of education budgets at national and subnational levels were allocated to pre-primary education. Low-income countries, on average, invest 2% of education budgets in pre-primary education, which is far below the target of 10% by 2030 suggested by UNICEF. In terms of international aid, pre-primary education remains the least funded sector.

What are the solutions?

Political will and ownership are key to transforming ECCE. UNESCO’s review highlights progress in some countries, giving an indication of what is required to successfully strengthen the capacity of ECCE systems:

• Expanding and diversifying access : Increasing investment and establishing a legal framework to expand ECCE services are essential steps. Innovative ECCE delivery mechanisms such as mobile kindergartens with teachers, equipment for learning and play, have been deployed in some countries to reach remote areas and provide children with pre-primary education.  
• Enhancing quality and relevance : ECCE curriculum frameworks should cover different aspects of early learning and prepare children with essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions to transit smoothly to formal education.
• Making ECCE educators and caregivers a transforming force : For the transformation of ECCE to take place, ECCE educators need to be adequately supported and empowered to play their part.
• Improving governance and stakeholder participation : Countries have adopted different modes of governance. There are generally two systems that are followed, an integrated system and a split system.
• Using funding to steer ECCE development : Strengthening domestic public financing is important for providing affordable ECCE. Since ECCE services are offered by different ministries, there must be a clear demarcation of funding and financing rules for different sectors and different ministries. Innovative financing may include earmarking resources from economic activities and other sources.
• Establishing systems for monitoring and assessing whole-of-child development . System-level action in strengthening the availability and reliability of data obtained from assessments enables efficient and timely monitoring of programmes and child developmental milestones.
• Galvanize international cooperation and solidarity . The World Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education is an opportunity to mobilize existing global, regional, and national networks to increase focus on identifying and sharing innovations, policies and practices.

Related items

• Early childhood
• Early childhood education

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• Pupil attendance in schools

Introduction

These figures are derived from regular data automatically submitted to the Department for Education (DfE) by participating schools. The data is submitted on a daily basis and includes the attendance codes for each pupil on their registers during the morning and afternoon sessions.

Figures relate to the attendance of 5 to 15 year old (i.e. compulsory school age) pupils in state-funded primary, secondary and special schools in England.

This release covers the 2023/24 academic year from 11 September to 3 May 2024. National level figures are included in underlying data for the week commencing 4 September. For the full 2022/23 academic year and termly pupil absence data, including by characteristics, please see this historical publication .

The figures are published as official statistics in development to give an indicative figure for the absence rate during the 2023/24 academic year. A national level figure was published on 7 September 2023 and from 28 September 2023 the pupil attendance dashboard will be updated fortnightly, providing aggregate metrics on overall absence and reasons for absence estimated at national, regional and local authority level only. The series was first published in 2022/23 and is intended to continue the series that was previously sourced from the daily Educational Settings Survey (EdSet) . Due to the timeliness of the data and that they are based on a subset of schools, figures are estimates that we expect to change as registers are adjusted. They should be viewed as an early indicator for the more detailed but less regular National Statistics on pupil absence (which include school level breakdowns). The National Statistics are updated termly, with the latest data published in March 2024 relating to the full academic year 2022/23. The next update is expected to be published in May 2024, relating to the Autumn term 2023/24.

If you are a school that has not yet signed up to share your data, please visit ‘ Share your daily school attendance data ’ for more information. This will also give you, your local authority and your multi-academy trust (if applicable) access to daily attendance reports to help identify pupils needing attendance support earlier.

Schools can now use the ‘ Compare your attendance ’ dashboard to compare with other schools in the local authority. This has been updated to show data for this current academic year. Use it to compare absence and unauthorised absence for your school, as well as special educational needs and free school meals pupils.

Headline facts and figures - 2024

This release covers the 2023/24 academic year up to 3 May 2024.

The attendance rate (proportion of possible sessions attended) was 92.8% across all schools in the week commencing 29 April 2024 . The absence rate was, therefore, 7.2% across all schools.

By school type, the absence rates across the week commencing 29 April 2024 were:

• 5.3% in state-funded primary schools (3.8% authorised and 1.5% unauthorised)
• 9.4% in state-funded secondary schools (5.4% authorised and 4.0% unauthorised)
• 13.0% in state-funded special schools (9.7% authorised and 3.4% unauthorised)

The data shows that the attendance rate across the academic year to date was 93.0%. The absence rate was, therefore, 7.0% across all schools.

By school type, the absence rates across the academic year 2023/24 to date were:

• 5.4% in state-funded primary schools (4.0% authorised and 1.4% unauthorised)
• 8.8% in state-funded secondary schools (5.4% authorised and 3.4% unauthorised)
• 12.8% in state-funded special schools (9.7% authorised and 3.1% unauthorised)

High-level national figures for the week commencing 4 September 2023 (first week back) are available in the data catalogue below. For the full 2022/23 academic year and termly pupil absence data, including by characteristics please see this historical publication .

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Data catalogue

Browse and download open data files from this release in our data catalogue

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Download all data available in this release as a compressed ZIP file

View related dashboard(s)

Access the Pupil attendance and absence in schools in England: data dashboard here

The pupil attendance dashboard is updated fortnightly. The latest data relates to the week commencing 29 April 2024. The dashboard displays attendance and absence headline figures, and reasons for absence at national, regional and local authority geographic levels. Data is available across state-funded primary, secondary and special schools and can be broken down by individual school type.

Underlying data is available within the “Explore data and files” section of this page, under the data catalogue.

Latest data - week commencing 29 April 2024

The latest data relates to the week commencing 29 April 2024 and is available in the pupil attendance dashboard . Data is collected on a daily basis and data for the interim weeks between publications is included in year-to-date figures and is available on a daily and weekly basis in the data catalogue available on this page (see “Explore data and files”). The dashboard displays attendance and absence headline figures, and reasons for absence at national, regional and local authority geographic levels. Data is available across primary, secondary and special schools and can be broken down by individual school type.

The data shows that the attendance rate across the week for all schools was 92.8%, giving an overall absence rate of 7.2%. The absence rate varied across the week with a low of 6.7% on Wednesday, and a peak 8.6% on Friday. The decrease in attendance on a Friday is in line with weekly patterns seen during 2022/23 and in historical attendance data .

Users should be aware of the following:

Response rate - 91% of schools shared data in the most recent week (though this has varied throughout the period of data collection), therefore national figures are estimates. Across school types this was: 92% of state-funded primary schools, 87% of state-funded secondary schools and 83% of state-funded special schools. Estimates for non-response - In recognition that response rates are not equal across school types and, therefore, not representative of the total school population, the total rates for all schools has been weighted based on the Spring 2023 school census. Reporting lag - Schools update their registers continually and attendance codes change, resulting in absence rates for a particular day to decrease over time. Analysis of data from the Summer 2022 term suggests that this could be a decrease in the absence rate of around 1 percentage point before settling down. Historical figures will be recalculated in each publication.

Spring term

Data for Spring term 2023/24 relates to the period from 2 January 2024 to 31 March 2024.

Comparisons in this section are drawn to Spring term 2022/23 National Statistics absence figures as the detailed and authoritative source of information provided by all schools in the school census. The present publication provides an indicative figure for absence based on regular data automatically submitted to the DfE. Due to the timeliness of this data and that they are based on a subset of schools, figures are estimates that we expect to change as registers are adjusted. To see Spring term figures based on the automatically submitted attendance data for Spring term 2022/23, please see this historic publication .

The overall absence rate for the Spring term was 7.3%, slightly above the Spring 2022/23 census absence figure of 7.0%. This is likely due to higher levels of illness absence with an illness absence rate of 3.8% in Spring 2023/24 compared to the Spring 2022/23 census figure of 3.6%.

Across the Spring term the persistent absence rate (pupils who miss 10% or more of their possible sessions) was 21.9%. This is a small increase from the Spring 2022/23 census persistent absence rate of 20.6%.

Absence remained high in the first week of the Spring term (7.9%) then fell to 6.5% in the week commencing 8 January. Absence then increased across the first half of the Spring term to a peak of 8.0% in the week just prior to half-term. Absence fell following the Spring half-term to 6.8%, remaining around this level until the week commencing 11 March when it was 7.5% and then rising to 8.3% in the final week of the Spring term. The increase in absence prior to half-term and the end of term is in line with weekly patterns seen during 2022/23 and in historical attendance data .

Changes in absence during the Spring term have mainly been driven by illness absence, which was 3.1% in the week commencing 8 January, but then increased to 4.5% in the week commencing 22 January. Illness remained around this level until the half-term break. Illness fell following the Spring half-term, to 3.2% in the week commencing 19 February however rose across the second half of the term to peak around 4.0% for the final few weeks of the term.

Unauthorised absence remained high in the first week of 2024 (3.1%) however then fell and remained around 2.3% for most of the first half of Spring term. There was a small increase in unauthorised absence in the week prior to half-term, when it was 2.6%. Unauthorised absence remained around 2.5% for most of the second half of the Spring term, peaking at 3.0% in the final week of the Spring term.

Free school meals (FSM) 

The overall absence rate for pupils who are eligible for free school meals was 11.3% in the Spring term. This compares to 5.9% for those pupils who were not eligible for free school meals. 

34.7% of pupils who were eligible for free school meals were persistently absent in the Spring term, compared to 17.2% of pupils who were not eligible.  

Special educational needs (SEN)  

The overall absence rate for pupils with an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan was 13.5% in the Spring term. This compares to 11.1% for pupils with SEN support and 6.6% with no identified SEN. 

36.1% of pupils with an EHC plan were persistently absent in the Spring term, compared to 31.9% for pupils with SEN support and 20.0% for pupils with no identified SEN.

The overall absence rate during the Spring term was 7.4% for female pupils and 7.2% for male pupils.

The persistent absence rate during the Spring term was 22.1% for female pupils and 21.7% for male pupils.

Academic year to date

Data for the academic year 2023/24 relates to the period from 11 September 2023 to 03 May 2024. Data is available in the pupil attendance dashboard and the data catalogue available on this page (see “Explore data and files”). The dashboard displays attendance and absence headline figures, and reasons for absence at national, regional and local authority geographic levels. Data is available across primary, secondary and special schools and can be broken down by individual school type.

Across the 2023/24 year to date, overall absence is 7.0%. The rate of persistent absence (pupils who miss 10% or more of their possible sessions) is 20.0%.

Absence peaked at 8.4%, in the final full week of the Autumn term (week commencing 11 December 2023), up from the start of the academic year when it was 4.9% and the previous peak in the week prior to the Autumn half-term when it was 7.1%. Absence fell following the Autumn term, dropping to 6.5% in the week commencing 8 January, but increased across the first half of Spring term to a peak of 8.0% in the week just prior to half-term. Absence fell again following Spring half-term to 6.8%, and then rose across the second half of the Spring term to 8.3%. Following the Easter holiday, absence fell and was 7.2% in the most recent week. The increase in absence prior to half-term and the end of term is in line with weekly patterns seen during 2022/23 and in historical attendance data .

Changes in absence throughout the academic year to date have mainly been driven by illness absence, which was 4.5% in the week commencing 11 December, up from the start of term when it was 2.0% and the previous peak of 3.8% in the week commencing 25 September. Illness absence fell at the start of the Spring term, dropping to 3.1% in the week commencing 8 January, but then increased to 4.5% in the week commencing 22 January. Illness remained around this level until the Spring half-term. Illness fell following the Spring half-term, to 3.2% in the week commencing 19 February however rose across the second half of the term to peak around 4.0% for the final few weeks of the term. Illness absence fell following the Easter holiday and was 3.4% in the most recent week

Unauthorised absence was fairly stable around 2.0% across the Autumn term, with peaks in the week immediately prior to half-term when it was 2.5% and in the final week of term when it was 2.7%. Unauthorised absence remained high in the first week of 2024 (3.1%) however then fell and remained around 2.3% for most of the first half of Spring term. There was a small increase in unauthorised absence in the week prior to half-term, when it was 2.6%. Unauthorised absence remained around 2.5% for most of the second half of Spring term, peaking at 3.0% in the final week of the Spring term. Unauthorised absence remained high following the Easter holiday, returning to 2.6% in the most recent week.

Help and support

Methodology.

Find out how and why we collect, process and publish these statistics.

Official statistics in development

These statistics are undergoing a development. They have been developed under the guidance of the Head of Profession for Statistics and published to involve users and stakeholders at an early stage in assessing their suitability and quality.

They have been produced as far as possible in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics.

This can be broadly interpreted to mean that these statistics are:

• managed impartially and objectively in the public interest
• meet identified user needs
• produced according to sound methods
• well explained and readily accessible

Find out more about the standards we follow to produce these statistics through our Standards for official statistics published by DfE guidance .

If you have a specific enquiry about Pupil attendance in schools statistics and data:

School Census Statistics Team

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If you have a media enquiry:

Telephone: 020 7783 8300

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If you have a general enquiry about the Department for Education (DfE) or education:

Telephone: 037 0000 2288

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