Education Minister Mohamed Abdel Latif’s proposal to introduce an Egyptian Baccalaureate for students entering the first year of secondary school in the next academic year has provoked debate among educators, politicians and families. Critics fear that fees for repeated exams will add to household costs and further weaken the promise of free public education.
Some see the return of the baccalaureate name, used in earlier periods of Egyptian education, as a step backwards. Others question whether changing the examination system can address the deeper problems of overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages and unequal access to learning amid the economic crisis.
The proposal has received cabinet approval in principle, with implementation arrangements to be discussed by the ministerial group for human development and a final formulation submitted to public consultation. It remains a proposal under discussion. On 14 January, the Education Ministry announced the start of consultation sessions with specialists and representatives of parents and teachers.
The initial design comprises a preparatory stage in the first secondary year and a main stage covering the second and third years. Students would take seven subjects in the preparatory year and seven across the main stage, which would last at least two years and could extend to four, excluding the first year.
Students would have two examination opportunities each year. Their first attempt in a subject would be free, with subsequent attempts costing EGP 500 each. Presenting the plan to cabinet on 8 January, Abdel Latif said it aimed to develop critical and analytical thinking rather than rote memorisation, within a broader system of continuing assessment.
The planned system would cover public schools, public language schools and private schools teaching the Egyptian curriculum. Schools awarding non-Egyptian qualifications, including international schools and Nile schools, would be outside its scope.
At EGP 500 per subject, repeating all seven main-stage examinations once would cost a student EGP 3,500—before private tutoring and other educational expenses.
An illustrative calculation using a cohort of 750,000 students produces EGP 1.3125 billion in fees if half repeat all seven exams, or EGP 656.25 million if a quarter do so. These are conditional calculations, not a forecast of ministry revenue: they assume every student counted repeats every subject.
The debate comes amid persistent concerns over education funding. At the National Youth Conference in Alexandria in June 2023, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi acknowledged that the government was not meeting the constitutional spending percentages, saying that providing for roughly 25 million pupils required hundreds of billions of pounds beyond the available resources.
The constitution sets minimum government allocations of 4% of gross national product for pre-university education and 2% for university education, to rise gradually towards international levels. Gross national product is the constitutional benchmark; it should not be confused with gross domestic product.
CAPMAS’s 2019/20 income and expenditure survey put annual education spending at an average EGP 8,850.6 for households with members enrolled in education. The figure was EGP 12,829.8 in urban areas and EGP 5,720.2 in rural areas, corresponding to reported shares of household expenditure of 15.7% and 9.2%, compared with 12.5% overall. These historical amounts are not estimates of present-day costs.
The Finance Ministry’s January 2025 monthly report recorded more than EGP 125.6 billion in education spending in July–November 2024/25, up about EGP 26 billion, or 26.1%, year on year. Separately, the full-year budget’s functional classification allocated roughly EGP 294.6 billion to education. An EIPR budget analysis calculated this at 1.72% of projected GDP, despite the nominal increase. A budget allocation and five months of recorded expenditure are different measures.
Fears for free education
Kamal Mogeeth, a researcher at the National Centre for Educational Research and chair of the Egyptian Centre for the Right to Education’s board of trustees, sees the proposal as part of a wider retreat from public provision. He links rising fees and spending restraint to what he describes as an aggressively market-oriented political and economic model.
In his view, international lenders’ emphasis on reducing state expenditure, subsidies and staffing contributes to this direction. He argues that the baccalaureate is driven by budget-cutting rather than educational research, and that it threatens the constitutional guarantee of free education in state institutions. This is his assessment of the policy’s motives, rather than evidence that an international lender has required this particular examination system.
Mogeeth points to official criticism of the numbers graduating in humanities subjects, the promotion of programming courses, rising educational charges and proposals to revive traditional Quran schools, or kuttab. He fears that poorer families will struggle to keep children in formal education while a small minority receives the skills and qualifications needed for better-paid work.
Mogeeth asks whether the state is moving towards a system in which most children acquire only basic literacy, while high-quality education becomes the preserve of those who can pay.
Published education statistics illustrate the continuing challenge of school dropout. Figures reported for the transition between 2019/20 and 2020/21 put primary-school dropout at about 0.2%, or 25,380 pupils, and preparatory-school dropout at 0.87%, or 43,351.
The Education Ministry’s 2021/22 statistical yearbook put the primary dropout rate at 0.17% for girls and 0.23% for boys. Matrouh recorded the highest governorate rate, 0.39%, followed by Assiut at 0.36%; the New Valley recorded 0.02% and South Sinai 0.05%. These figures concern those particular school years, not a current national estimate.
Who will receive a good education?
Writer and political researcher Ammar Ali Hassan also sees a trend towards reducing the state’s financial responsibility for education. He cites higher fees from primary school through university, the expansion of private and foreign universities and the use of unpaid volunteers in public schools. He criticises the conditions of the 30,000-teacher recruitment competition and the controversy over the education minister’s academic credentials.
Hassan stresses that he has not yet studied all the details of the baccalaureate proposal. He therefore stops short of deciding whether it is primarily a withdrawal from public education, a system for educating a small minority, or an attempt to improve the existing model. His immediate demand is that the proposal be debated publicly rather than settled behind closed doors.
Nevertheless, he fears the direction is towards selective access to education. In an era shaped by communications technology and demands for democratic participation, he argues, restricting broad education to particular social groups would be deeply misguided.
Hassan connects education to nation-building, freedom and citizens’ ability to claim their rights. He rejects a narrow view of schooling as merely preparation for a specific job or recruitment into the state apparatus. He also disputes the argument that resources are simply unavailable, contrasting spending on roads, buildings and other construction projects with the needs of schools.
Education is financed by taxpayers, he notes, while other sectors receive large allocations. Unlike Mogeeth, he does not consider it adequate to attribute these choices to demands from the International Monetary Fund.
Education as a commodity
Economist Elhami al-Mirghani, deputy leader of the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, describes the expansion of paid educational services as privatisation in practice. He points to crowded classrooms, dropout, shortages of teachers and teaching space, private-sector expansion and fee-paying services within public institutions.
He says education’s share of total budget expenditure has fallen from around 12% in 2014/15 to approximately 7.6% in 2024/25, while its share of GDP has declined from roughly 3.9% to 1.7%. In his assessment, this turns a public service into a commodity accessible according to purchasing power.
Al-Mirghani describes an economy increasingly organised around shopping malls and gated compounds, requiring retail assistants, cleaners, maintenance workers and guards, while affluent families educate their children internationally or abroad. He argues that modest social assistance cannot offset the barriers facing poor families.
He also points to the growth of private and international universities and parallel, fee-paying programmes within public universities, including foreign-language courses, as evidence of accelerating marketisation in higher education.
The World Bank’s 2022 public expenditure review connected resource constraints to overcrowding and pressure on teachers. It described a pre-university system serving more than 24 million students, the overwhelming majority in public schools. Its reform scenario modelled the addition of about 117,000 classrooms over five years to relieve pressure. These are findings and projections from the 2022 review, not a fresh count of shortages in January 2025.
Religion, grades and the return of the kuttab
Another contested feature of the initial baccalaureate proposal is making religious education a subject worth 100 marks within the overall score. Politician Mohamed Aboul Ghar, former leader of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, has warned that this could encourage sectarian competition.
Mogeeth questions whether enough suitably trained Christian religious-education teachers are available, and whether a common curriculum acceptable across Christian denominations would remain uncontroversial once high-stakes examination results depended on it. He also asks whether religious teaching should become subject to the same pressures of private tutoring, market competition and exam cheating as other graded subjects.
The debate coincides with Religious Endowments Minister Osama al-Azhari’s initiative to revive kuttab, traditional institutions for Quranic learning. The minister says the programme would teach memorisation, meaning and the principles of Islam through al-Azhar’s approach, using selected teachers. It falls within the presidential initiative for human development.
At a meeting with Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly and al-Azhari, Sisi directed that the proposal be carefully studied alongside improvements to the circumstances of imams and preachers. Quran reciters’ syndicate head Mohamed Hashad said 16,000 reciters and teachers, including 500 women, were available to help train instructors.
Critics fear that separating Muslim children into Quran schools and Christian children into church-based Sunday schools could deepen religious divisions. They also associate the older model with rote learning, unquestioning obedience and corporal punishment, including the falaka, in which the soles of a child’s feet were struck. Their concern is whether a revived institution would reproduce such methods instead of meeting children’s contemporary educational needs.
A different examination system is not enough
Adel Saraya, a professor of educational technology and university adviser, says objections concern more than the revived name. He questions the merging of subjects, the proposed importance of religious-education marks and the availability of specialist teachers and curriculum designers, particularly for Christian education.
He argues that reform should give greater attention to Arabic, history, geography, culture and civic education. He considers the proposal closer to the British examination pathways commonly called “IG” in Egypt than to a plan emerging from the National Dialogue or Egypt Vision 2030.
Saraya worries that spreading decisive examinations over two years will expose families to 24 months of pressure. A system suited to particular international or Japanese-model schools, he says, may not suit most Egyptian households.
Reducing the number of subjects also raises questions about continuity: he fears that distributing courses across separate years could leave a student without Arabic or English teaching for an entire year. More fundamentally, he asks whether teachers have been prepared for the new curriculum and whether school buildings and resources can support it.
For Saraya, a competent, well-prepared teacher remains the essential condition for any educational system to succeed.
He calls for discussions involving the National Dialogue, the teachers’ syndicate and education faculties before adoption. He also proposes a high-level body for long-term educational planning, bringing together around 60 specialists to design curricula from kindergarten onwards around a clear vision of the country’s future.
That vision, he says, should include stronger technical, vocational and craft education and practical skills for employment. Rather than reviving the kuttab, he favours investment in community and one-classroom schools serving villages, school dropouts, people excluded from formal education and older learners.
Such schools could teach Arabic, English, computing, ethical guidance and citizenship. He suggests employing graduates of Zagazig University’s community-education programme, rather than relying on preachers whose instruction may neglect everyday skills.
Writer and researcher Sara Allam fears the new system will further encourage upper-middle-income families to abandon Egyptian qualifications in favour of international certificates. She notes that restricted access to public universities has already made such qualifications a route into private and foreign institutions.
In a Facebook post, Allam argues that weakening the route into public universities amounts to indirect privatisation. She warns of an education system that no longer enables social mobility: wealthy parents can preserve their children’s opportunities, while poorer families remain in an under-resourced system offering weaker employment prospects. She links these concerns to wider public policy and the appointment of a private-school owner to lead the ministry.
Education specialist and university professor Mohamed Khalil offers a more qualified view. He says nominally free education has already become commercialised through private tutoring: families spend at tutoring centres what they save in school fees.
Khalil believes paid retakes could encourage students to work harder on their first attempt, avoiding an additional charge for their families. He supports giving religious education greater importance, seeing it as a response to declining ethical standards. However, he opposes reviving outdated kuttab teaching methods and fears sectarian consequences.
He criticises the proposed absence of Arabic and English as core subjects in the final secondary year, the marginalisation of a second foreign language and insufficient preparation of teaching staff. At the same time, he welcomes multiple chances to improve grades and pathways in business, arts and literature, medicine and life sciences, and engineering and computing.
In his view, a more flexible combination of compulsory, optional and advanced subjects, with opportunities to retake exams, could better connect education to future study and work. The question is whether that flexibility is supported by trained teachers and adequate resources.
The government presents a different account of funding. Its 2024/25 citizen budget lists EGP 565 billion for pre-university education, EGP 293 billion for higher education and around EGP 140 billion for scientific research under its calculation of constitutional entitlements. These broader totals differ from the functional education allocation and should not be treated as identical measures of direct sector spending.
Whether the baccalaureate becomes a useful reform or another financial burden depends on more than its name and exam structure. Families’ ability to keep children in school, the quality of teaching and the distribution of public resources remain central. The pressures of poverty and inflation make those questions urgent, whatever final form the proposal takes.
