The right to education is taking a back seat to fiscal sustainability. International cooperation has not prioritized the realization of the right to education, and those poor governments which are committed to provide free primary education have not been adequately supported by the resources they require from donor governments and development banks. This leaves developing country governments caught between their human rights obligations and economic exigencies. International human rights law demands ensuring free primary education while debt relief strategies demand fiscal sustainability. In the end, debt servicing takes precedence over human rights obligations because sanctions for non-compliance are immediate and expensive.

Despite the rhetoric to the contrary, many governments and intergovernmental agencies are not committed to education as a human right for all children. Military spending far exceeds investment in education around the world – there are at least 150 soldiers for every 100 teachers in the world. Only 2% of educational funds come from international aid. Compulsory education is not supported in global education strategies as this would define education as a public service and a public responsibility. Instead supply and demand rationales continue to dominate educational policy making. Where demand is excessive the cost of education has been transferred from governmental to family budgets. This has institutionalised economic exclusion from education.

The boundary between public and private education has been obliterated by conditioning access to public school by payments. In developing and transition states 35% of the cost of education is privately funded; in industrialised countries the figure is 8%. This conflicts with the very notion of free and compulsory education, where education is free at the point of use because getting educated is mandatory for all children.

Charging for education which should be free is a global phenomenon. In Sub-Saharan Africa primary education is only really free in three countries; in seven countries over 30% of children never even start school. In post-communist states (such as Eastern Europe or Central Asia) free education is now virtually non-existent; teachers’ salaries are often below official poverty benchmarks and various formal and informal charges for impoverished public education have made education much too expensive for the poor.

More than twenty different charges may be imposed in primary school. Country data shows that children are pushed out of school as the expenses of going to school start mounting. The cost of free education varies dramatically. The price of school textbooks and uniforms may be less than 3% or more than 30% of the family budget. Data also indicates that school enrolment and attendance dramatically rise when school fees and other charges are eliminated. Experience of countries which have compensated families for lost revenue in sending children to school shows significant success in increasing retention of children in education.

Table 1: Countries with charges for public primary education

Table 1 classifies regions by the prevalence of charges in public primary school, from Sub-Saharan Africa as the most affected region towards Latin America, with its commitment to free secondary rather than only primary education. Africa has attracted immense international attention but there has been almost no publicity for the plight of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which is the second most affected region. The transition from centrally-planned, all-encompassing and free to a market-based education points to the correlation between poverty and policy. That region illustrates impoverishment in its extreme but some of its facets are present world-wide. Poverty-based exclusion from education is not confined to developing countries. It spans policy-based charges in primary schools in Israel or New Zealand. These are indicative of the changing practice of states in dividing the financial responsibility for education between the government and the family.