Save the Children Romania is reporting that only three out of five children who entered school nine years ago managed to get average grades above 5 in the National Examination.
There are counties where the share is around 25%. For example, in Giurgiu County, it reaches 27.26%, in Calarasi 25.9%, and in Covasna 24.51%, according to a press release issued by the organisation.
The current generation of students/graduates of the eighth grade started with 189,730 children - the number of students enrolled in the preparatory class in the 2015-2016 school year. This year, 160,467 students signed up for the National Examination, and the percentage of averages below 5 was 15.35% in urban areas and 42.27% in the countryside.
In 2023, more than 1.3 million children in Romania (39%) were at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Also, one in six children does not attend school, and the difference in school performance among students from poverty-stricken families compared with other children is one of the highest in the world. Moreover, one in 5 children fails to complete compulsory formal education on time, and half of the children are functionally illiterate, due to the poor quality of education in vulnerable communities, according to the organisation.
At the same time, chronic functional illiteracy remains at the level of the first PISA assessment in 2009, i.e. almost half of the affected children: between 41.7% (reading) and 48.6% (mathematics) (PISA, 2022). The results of the analysis reveal that the Romanian education system is the most inequitable among all the more than 100 participating countries, according to a 2022 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-opeartion and Developments (OECD).
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