More than one in four children don’t go to school in Romania

The number of students in Romania is 3.64 million, namely 72.2% of the children who are eligible to go to school, according to the National Statistics Institute (INS) data. Some 27.8% of Romanian children don’t attend school, although they’ve reached the school age. The early school dropout rate in Romania remains one of the highest in Europe, especially in rural areas. Due to insufficient action to stimulate school attendance, poor children have great difficulties in terms of access to education, according to a European Commission report published recently. The rate of early school leavers amounted to 18.1% in Romania in 2015, almost 6 percentage points above the EU average. The number of people aged 0-18 that had the residence in Romania on January 1 this year amounted to 3.98 million, down by 23,400 compared to the previous year. The school population was 3.64 million. Over 553,000 children went to kindergarten, 1.7 million attended primary school, and over 673,600 children attended high school. editor@romania-insider.com