Rabat – The Minister of Education, Vocational Training and Scientific Research, Said Amzazi, said that the development of preschool education necessitates an annual budget of MAD 3 billion.
In his presentation held on Thursday, July 12 in front of the Government Council, Amzazi said that his ministry will launch a national program of generalization and reform of the pre-primary education in Morocco.
According to Amzazi, the ministry will launch the program on July 18 to include the 2018-2019 academic year and will run to 2028.
According to the official, the program aims at reaching a school enrollment of 67 percent by 2021-2021 and 100 percent by 2027-2028.
Through this program, the ministry of education pledged to reduce dropout rates and to improve the education system.
According to Amzazi, the program also aims at offering training to teachers, reinforce integration of teachers into the job market, and add 57,000 additional classes and 55,000 teachers by 2027-2028.
In 2017, the ministry of education announced that the number of student dropouts decreased by 15.3 percent to a record low of 279,111 during the 2016-2017 academic year from the 329,618 in 2015-2016.
More work to be done
School dropouts remains an issue that Morocco still is working to reduce. In its 2017 annual labor survey, Morocco’s High Commissioner of Planning (HCP) unveiled worrying figures of children who left schools for employment.
The report says that 247,000 out of 7,049,000 children aged between seven and 17 face the burden of employment. Some of the children’s responsibilities are considered vastly too dangerous for their age.
Lack of schools in rural areas is also contributed to the issue of school dropout.
Despite progress in access to preschool education in Morocco, only 43 percent of Moroccan children aged 4-5 were enrolled in preschool and only 27.9 percent in rural areas between 2015-2016, according to a 2017 World Bank report.
The report also added that the quality of preschool education “varies tremendously, and the lack of an effective quality-assurance mechanism at this level hinders substantial improvements in quality and consistency.”
