Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
125
access to education. As a consequence, Gross Enrolment Rates (GER) were already noticeably
high in 1996, with GER at primary level at 101% and improvements in lower secondary and upper
secondary GERs between 1996 and 2002, reached 96% and 77% respectively. In 2012, the GER
at primary level and lower secondary dipped to 89% and 87% respectively, a result of both the
usage of old census data from 2004340 (affecting the reliability of the estimates) and the refugee
influx from 2011-2012. By 2014, GER rates increased at primary level, probably due to the
response of the Jordanian government (the number of double shift schools increased, registration
without a civil card was allowed, combined with enrolment campaigns) and international donors
who focused heavily on primary schools.
Jordan has achieved gender parity in primary enrolment since 1979 and kept a good record in
primary enrolment gender parity since. In both 2012 and 2014, GER for girls versus GER for boys
were 88.2% vs 89.2% and 97.6% vs 97.1% respectively, moving from a slight disadvantage for
girls in 2012 to a slight disadvantage for boys in 2014. In lower secondary, gender parity remains
around 100, with a slight advantage for girls in both years. This is in contrast to the average upper
middle income country which still enrol more boys than girls. Jordan also has one of the highest
female literacy rates in the region at 95.2% 341.
Worsening trends: Upper secondary enrolments in 2014 decreased by over 5% from 2012,
probably due to a combination of lower government and international focus on adolescents,
blocked enrolments in formal public schools for children aged 3 years above the grade age342,
pressures for child labour as well as higher incidence of early marriage in the incoming Syrian
populations than the hosting ones. In addition, for those enrolled in school, there is a high rate of
student absenteeism. 40%of students in Jordan reported skipping at least one entire day of school
without authorization in the previous two weeks, compared to the OECD average of 15%343.
340 The GER is calculated as the total enrolment "in a specific level of education, regardless of age, expressed as a percentage of
the population in the official age group corresponding to this level of education” The population in the official age group is a
projection based on the latest population census. The older the census the less precise is the estimation and as such trends may
not be properly representative of the reality.
341 NCHRD (2016)
342 explain this policy more in the footnote + section 3
343 NCHRD (2016)
Table 13 Gross Enrolment Ratios until most recent year, 2014
GERs 1996 2002 2012 2014
Pre-primary 27.2% 32.8% 32.2% 32.8%
Primary 101.1% 105.7% 88.7% 97.3%
Lower secondary 90.0% 96.4% 87.3% 86.5%
Upper secondary 72.2% 76.8% 77.9% 73.8%
Source: UNESCO Institute of Statistics