The Minister of Education, Marco Antonio Avilareported on Wednesday, in the framework of a meeting with dozens of civil society organizations linked to education, that more than 50,000 students left the school system between 2021 and 2022.
According to Thirdthe Study Center of the Ministry of Education (Mineduc), with the aim of measuring how much the Covid-19 pandemic had impacted the school system, detected that there were 50,529 disengaged students between 2021 and 2022. This means that they were enrolled in 2021, but they do not appear registered in 2022.
The number is 24% higher than in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic landed in the country.
The Study Center also detailed that 227,000 students between the ages of five and 24 left the system -or never entered it- between 2004 and 2021. It is a figure that serves as context and does not add to the figure previously indicated, they pointed out from the Mineduc.
For its part, the accumulated national average attendance between March and September 2022 reached 83%, 5.3 percentage points (pp) less than in 2019. The most worrying decreases occurred in the regions of Atacama (-10 pp), Antofagasta , Arica and Parinacota, and Coquimbo (-6.1 to -6.4 pp), according to the aforementioned media.
Serious non-attendance (attendance below 85%, considering the months of March to September) affects 1,239,330 students, representing about 29% of the total enrollment in the school system.
