273 million children out of school as global education crisis deepens

The number of children out of school has risen for the seventh year in a row, reaching 273 million worldwide, according to a new United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report highlighted by Human Rights Watch. The sharpest gaps are at the earliest and latest stages of education: only 60% of primary school students have had at least one year of pre-primary education, and 194 million out-of-school children are of secondary school age. At the current pace, the world will not reach 95% upper secondary completion until 2105.

Cost is the most common reason children stay home. While primary education is nearly universally free under international law, families in most countries are still expected to pay for preschool and secondary schooling out of pocket. In Uganda, where there is no publicly funded preschool system, Human Rights Watch and the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights found that prohibitively expensive private preschool fees push the majority of young children out of early education entirely. In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than one in four children of pre-primary age are enrolled.

These findings are fueling calls for a new international treaty that would explicitly guarantee free pre-primary and secondary education for all children — a protection that current international law simply does not provide. Formal consideration of such a treaty, structured as an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, began at the UN last year, and more than 60 countries have already expressed support. The treaty would not fix the crisis overnight, but it would create a legal floor that governments could be held to, regardless of a family’s ability to pay.

When states meet again in Geneva this August, advocates say the opportunity to close this gap in international law should not be missed. The UNESCO data makes the stakes clear: millions of children — particularly girls, children in poverty, and those in sub-Saharan Africa — are being locked out of their futures not by lack of talent or ambition, but by the absence of political will and legal obligation. Getting that treaty across the line would be a meaningful first step toward changing that.