Thousands of Iranian children of elementary-school age have been unable to receive an education due to financial hardship, Iran’s Education Ministry reported on Tuesday.
Rezvan Hakimzadeh, deputy minister of primary education, said 140,562 students had been identified as not attending school last year, with the majority located in Sistan and Baluchestan, Tehran, Razavi Khorasan, and Khuzestan provinces. Of those children, 54,445 were in the first grade, he said.
Nearly 42,000 of the students had left Iran with their families, while 18,000 were not required to enroll due to disabilities, Hakimzadeh said. Thousands of others were out of school due to family financial hardship, child labor, a lack of adequate guardianship, or enrollment in unlicensed education centers, he added.
There were 86 cases in which a child of elementary-school age was not attending school because they had married, the report said.
Primary school in Iran is for children ages six to 12, while Iranian law generally requires girls to be 13 and boys to be 15 to marry. In some cases, however, a judge’s approval can allow for marriage at an earlier age.
The start of the school year in Iran has drawn greater attention to the country’s rapid demographic change.
According to the Razavi Foundation’s Astan Quds Razavi media site Quds Online, 1.154 million six-year-old children began primary school in Iran this year, about 76,000 fewer than last year.
Iran's challenged demography
Iran’s declining birth rates, delays in marriage and childbearing, economic pressures, and lifestyle changes have all impacted the country’s shifting demography, Quds Online reported.
Alireza Sajedi, head of Iran’s Population Monitoring Center of the National Organization for Civil Registration, told Quds Online the number of births had fallen from about 1.116 million in 2021 to fewer than 980,000 in 2024.
The downward demographic shift could eventually lead schools to reduce both classroom sizes and the actual number of classes in cities, Quds Online reported. In rural areas, however, it may no longer be viable to keep schools open, the report said.