The education systems in Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States comprising the now-independent former Soviet republics are excluding more than 14 million children each year in a region formerly known for its high-quality education, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

"This situation will lead to intergenerational cycles of poverty, and undermine the capacity of governments to develop globally competitive economies based on skilled labour rather than cheap labour," UNICEF’s regional director Maria Calivis warned at this week’s release of a new report – Education for Some, more than Others.

In spite of the economic recovery and increased public expenditure on education in many countries over the past decade, most national education systems are struggling to provide universal education, the study concludes. A key indicator was that there are an estimated 2.4 million ’missing children’ of primary-school age and almost 12 million missing secondary-school children who should be in school but are not.

Ms. Calivis said that meant more than 14 million children entered adult life every year without any kind of formal education or school diploma and this in a region largely known for its former high levels of access, quality and equality in education.

The report found that public expenditure on education reinforced rather than counteracted social, ethnic and economic inequalities in access to and completion of basic education. Family background, mainly parents’ income but also education, had increasingly become a determinant in enrolment and attendance, particularly at pre-school level.

Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Tajikistan, countries with low economic indicators, had the lowest attendance rates, less than 50 per cent for upper high school, and in some instances less than 30 per cent for pre-school.

The situation of the Roma children and gender inequality were also major issues in some countries. In three with the largest Roma communities – Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania – only a tiny proportion of Roma have any schooling beyond primary, compared to non-Roma. Roma educational attainment ranges from 10 per cent to 35 per cent in secondary school while only 1 per cent of Roma across the region attended higher education.

The report also shows that no country was achieving equal representation of girls in basic education but the numbers were close, 95 girls to 100 boys on average. The most striking aspect of the figures was the feminization of higher education throughout the region. Girls outnumbered boys, in most cases significantly, in all countries except Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Azerbaijan. Only Turkey and Tajikistan were in trouble to meet the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of eliminating gender disparity at all levels of education by 2015.

The report calls for governments to substantially increase spending on education to at least 6 per cent of their gross domestic product as against a regional average of 3 to 4 per cent, and move from a distribution of public expenditure that reinforces inequality to one that counteracts inequality.