An Overview of Primary Education Around the World.

Primary education has been an integral part in the life of a child. It serves as a platform on which a pupil sets his future. It is generally called elementary education and it is mandatory for each child to be educated from this level. The goal of primary education is to achieve literacy and numeric at the basic level and build a strong foundation for other levels of education.

Various countries have different ages for primary schooling requirements. There are few exceptions where a child is gifted and is promoted to the next level of education. As primary education is a major subset of the education system, it forms an integral part in molding the life of a child in a society. But this system of education has been of major concern in many countries for the lack of infrastructure, workforce, and other parameters. By statistics, there are about 100 million children who are out of school and those who are in school either drop out or don’t make it to the next level. This is of utmost concern all over the world and it continues to be on number one priority.

The numbers show us a very dire situation as more than 50 million children are denied primary education around the world. One in three children in Africa drop out of primary education. Individuals and pupils with low funds or disabilities are given no relief for their children to get into primary education. Many countries in the present are still struggling with gender bias issues where girls are denied this basic form of education. Funding primary education is another issue as the allocated budget is not sufficient to meet the demands of modern technology and techniques. Even most of the developed nations pass bills with reduced expenditure for primary education. Backward nations by default do not have funds due to faulty governance, corruption, poor management skills. Good infrastructure is the basic requirement, but with countries with low literacy rates good teachers are hard to find and hiring expert teachers becomes an expensive issue for any country, as they would not work for low pay grades. Even training given to teachers is not up to the mark in some parts of the world.

The lack of teaching materials like books, boards etc is another issue to be looked at as most of them are old and outdated and most of them even do not have cost bearing for basic facilities like student transport, electricity etc. Some primary schools would induct so many pupils at one time to increase their budget but would not be able to handle a good student to teacher ratio by getting in too many students into one class and degrading the quality of education. With so many curricula around the world, there is a major confusion for parents to choose the best one for their child according to their monetary backgrounds.

If you are looking for primary schools, you can consider,

1) http://almushrif.sch.ae/

2) http://www.southrise.org.uk/