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National law and policies on fee or for free – Egypt

It matters if the state provides education for free or charges fees. Every state in the world has signed up to at least one international treaty obliging it to making primary education free and compulsory, and secondary education progressively so. But education cannot be compulsory if it is not also free and this contradiction is too often ignored. Furthermore, what does free actually mean in a world with numerous overt and hidden costs, to learners, parents, local communities? In a 2006 survey by Katarina Tomasevski education was found not to be genuinely free in the vast majority of countries in the world. The quote below on your country (if information was available) is from this very important survey.

 

The national laws and policies are the applications of the constitution, yet may actually be more advanced than this, as they are generally redrawn or updated more frequently than constitutions are. Laws are made by the government, the parliamentarians, and the bureaucrats, often in consultation with civil society. However, this also leaves them open to vulnerability and retrogression as they can become instruments of short-term politics and priorities. Laws and policies are open to change and influence through the routes of the democratic process and civil society campaigns. And where possible their violations should be challenged, either through the courts or through judicial review.

 

The state is the central actor in any claim to the right to education: it is the prime duty-bearer and the prime implementer; it is the guarantor; and it is the state´s signature vis-à-vis the international norms and standards which binds it to respect, protect and fulfil the right to education. The state must therefore be judged or challenged on its central text on the right to education, whether this be the constitution, the laws or the policies.

Governmental policy and the associated statistics present primary education as free and (almost) all-encompassing. As of 1999, the law has obliged the government to provide nine years of free education to all children aged 6-15. This has built on the 1971 Constitution which stipulates that “education is a right guaranteed by the state”.

 

The government’s claim that “that all children are entitled to education during the first, compulsory, stage, that education is provided free of charge” is countered in non- governmental sources, which demonstrate that education is not provided free of charge. Human Rights Watch found in 2005 that “parents of children in public schools pay registration and health insurance fees, school uniforms and supplies, and often are pressured by underpaid teachers to pay for private tutoring so that their children succeed in school exams.

 

Much as in other countries, those who are out of school share poverty amongst other characteristics and this routinely translates into their having to start working too early and too much. Coherent data are difficult to encounter because different age categorizations and associates statistics abound.

 

Having examined educational statistics for Egypt, UNICEF pointed out in 1995 that they were reliable when based on school records but unreliable for calculating how many children were out of school. The reason was deficient demographic data  and there is no evidence that the situation has improved in the past decade. In 1998, more than one in ten (11%) school age children (then defined 6-14) were out of school. Although most of out-of-school children work this is not officially recorded. In particular, girls’ work within their family is never recorded as ‘work’. In 2004, school aged children were defined as 6-11 year olds and 1,610,680 were estimated to be out of school. The key problem is the high cost of education compared with low family incomes. This leads to non-compliance with the compulsory- education law as well as the law prohibiting child labour. Moreover, birth registration data may not exist or, if they do, they are not necessarily correlated to school entry data. As a consequence, many children do not figure in official statistics. Also, Education International has found that the access to public education depends on the proof of citizenship. Children who do not possess it include those with Egyptian mothers and foreign fathers: “400,000 children of foreign fathers are not entitled to attend public schools”.

 

The pillar of education was governmental provision of schooling, from primary to university level, which then led to the employment of school-leavers by the government. In the aftermath of its independence, the government of Egypt aimed to replace parallel education systems by the “national primary school, free and compulsory for boys and girls.” This had been a promise and a self-imposed obligation for the government in 1953.951 By its own estimate, the government still educates most children. Some 92% of children enrol in public education and 8% in what the government calls ‘Al-Azhar primary schools’.952 Its role profoundly changed twenty years later, especially as the link between government-provided education and government-provided employment has been severed:

 

University graduates from 1962, and graduates of secondary vocational schools and technical institutes from 1964, were guaranteed employment in the public sector until 1990. The employment guarantee significantly increased the private benefits of education, while the abolition of fees at around the same time significantly reduced its private costs.

 

That model was dismantled when private costs of education increased with structural adjustment programmes. Changes in the 1990s included a quiet abandonment of free education as part of a typical World Bank’s policy package. No tuition fees were formally imposed but payments to supplement teachers' insufficient salaries became an established practice. Guaranteed employment by the government withered away at the same time for the same reason. Alexandre Buccianti has claimed that the practice of automatic employment of all university graduates lasted from 1962 to 1985, boosting the number of government employees to over 4 million. Increased graduate unemployment in the 1990s became seen as a security threat. Governmental policy in the face of various self-defined security threats has prompted the European Union to raise human rights in its dialogue with Egypt.