For a whole year, Amani Mahmoud, who lives with her family in the Hadayek October area, waited for her son to be accepted at one of the official language schools, after she had submitted his file through the online placement system for the kindergarten stage in June 2024. At the time, he was five years and 18 days old at the start of October, which meant he could not wait until the following year, as he would have passed six, exceeding the maximum age for admission to experimental schools. Despite this, his name was included in the sixth and final stage of placement, as one of the youngest.
But a few days ago, Amani, like other parents in this stage, was taken by surprise by a decision issued by the Giza Directorate of Education stipulating that their children be placed in schools completely outside their residential area. Her son was accepted at Kafr Helwa Government Primary School (Arabic), located in the village of Kafr Helwa in Atfih district, 92 kilometres from Hadayek October; the journey there by car takes more than two hours.
When she visited the school, she was told, like other parents, that she had to pay the fees for the first stage of kindergarten, even though their children had not attended it. They were also asked to sign a pledge not to transfer the child until the end of the primary stage, and to register within 15 days, otherwise the application would be cancelled. Amani wonders whether the Ministry of Education aims to push parents toward private schools, rather than exhausting them with the time, effort and cost of daily transport from Hadayek October to Atfih, especially given that attendance is compulsory in the primary stage.
Mohamed Zaki lived through the same ordeal. He submitted his younger daughter’s file last June for her to join the kindergarten stage. After a wait that lasted 11 months, her result appeared in the sixth and final stage of the online placement, which assigned her to a school in the Atfih administration, even though the family’s place of residence is in Hadayek October, where her older sister studies at Al-Salam School.
Under the imposed pledge, the father was forced to accompany his little girl every day, five days a week, along a road that takes two hours to get there and two hours to come back, for seven school years. This drove him to file an official complaint with the Cabinet, bearing the number 99629098, as he told Zawia3.
Filmmaker Ahmed Fadl was one of those affected by the placement decision. He lives with his family in the Faisal district of Giza Governorate and has two sons in basic education. The elder son studies at an experimental school located within the same residential block, while the younger had to wait a full school year, since the family submitted his file for the kindergarten stage in June 2024, in the hope that he would be accepted at one of the official language schools.
But with the issuance of the decision placing the pupils of the sixth stage of placement, the family was surprised to find that the younger son had been accepted at a school in the Atfih area, on the Cairo – Assiut desert road, at a distance of 106 kilometres from the Faisal district, which takes around two hours to reach by car.
Fadl recounts, speaking to Zawia3, that when he went to the school to complete the admission procedures, he was shocked by an attempt to compel him to sign a pledge confirming the parent’s agreement to the school at which the child had been accepted, with an undertaking not to request his transfer to any other school during the kindergarten stage and the first grades of primary education.
Fadl refused to sign and decided to take complaints to officials at the Ministry of Education, demanding that the younger child be reunited with his older brother in the same school, which lies within the family’s residential area.
A Distant Placement… and Suffering Close at Hand
Amani El-Sherif, founder of the Experimental Schools Union, affirms that the kindergarten placement crisis recurs every year without radical solutions, despite the long wait parents endure for admission results. Every year, the results come loaded with new disappointment: after a whole year of anticipation, families are surprised to find that there are not enough places for their children within the educational administrations to which they belong, amid a crisis that has persisted for years and worsens with successive ministers and heads of directorates and educational administrations, without any positive solutions worth mentioning.
In a post she published on her “Facebook” account, she explained that Giza and Cairo governorates are a model of this crisis, as there are not enough places to place the children of the last stage of placement within their original administrations, which forces parents to accept the placement of their children in other, distant educational administrations to avoid losing the opportunity of admission to experimental schools.
El-Sherif points out that Ministerial Decree No. 285 stipulates that the age of application to experimental schools starts at four years and runs to six years minus one day, but the reality in densely populated governorates such as Giza and Cairo imposes an actual upper threshold starting at five years, as a result of the pressure on schools. Children up to the fifth stage of placement were placed in the schools chosen by their parents, except for those whose ages ranged between five years and five months, for whom no places were available in the administrations they had applied to, because of the small number of classrooms and the issuance of new ministerial instructions reducing the number of pupils per class from 60 to 49.
She adds that placement in distant administrations has become a daily ordeal resulting from the shortage of places. Previously, children were placed in administrations such as October and Sheikh Zayed, but this year saw an unprecedented escalation, with children placed in even more distant administrations such as Atfih, El-Saff and El-Hawamdeya, even though they live in closer administrations such as Haram, Bulaq and Omraniya. These long distances mean a daily journey of no less than two hours, making the child’s regular attendance almost impossible, even though this educational stage requires regular commitment to build the child’s academic foundation.
She continues that the parent finds himself facing two options, both difficult: either to refuse to have his child placed in a distant school and be forced to turn to a nearby private or government school, or to accept the placement in the hope of transferring later to a closer administration, even though parents are asked to sign a pledge not to transfer, a routine pledge that was added to the files years ago but does not in practice prevent transfer if places become available in the original administration. El-Sherif concluded with a call for officials to reconsider the distribution mechanism and to respond to parents’ legitimate demand that their children be placed within administrations close to their place of residence.
Protests and Collective Complaints
Dozens of parents of kindergarten pupils gathered in front of the building of the Giza Governorate Directorate of Education on Sunday morning to denounce the placement of their children in schools far from their residential areas, while 747 parents of pupils who applied for the kindergarten stage at official language schools filed a complaint with the Governor of Giza, demanding that their children be returned to the residential block rule and placed in schools near their homes. Zawia3 obtained a copy of a memorandum to be presented to the Governor of Giza regarding the collective complaint, which concluded that, in the current situation, it was impossible to accept the pupils at official language schools within the residential block, and proposed that they be transferred to government (Arabic) schools or wait until the construction of new official language schools is completed.
In parallel, a number of parents of kindergarten pupils at the Baraem Misr Official Language School and the Imam Mohamed Abdou Official Language School, both affiliated with the Hadayek October Educational Administration, whose children were placed in schools belonging to the Atfih Educational Administration, which takes them around two hours to reach, sent a distress appeal to the President of the Republic, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, to solve their children’s problem.
Meanwhile, lawyer Rasha Mohamed, one of the affected parents in 6th of October City, explains that the cause of the problem lies in the poor distribution carried out by the Giza Directorate of Education during the placement of pupils applying for the kindergarten stage: a large number of pupils from the Haram, Bulaq and Faisal administrations were transferred to schools in 6th of October City, while pupils from the Hadayek October area were placed in Arabic government schools in the Atfih Educational Administration. A number of their parents were forced to sign a pledge not to transfer, on the pretext that it was a mere formality, and the registration period was cut to 5 days on the pretext of closing the fiscal year, while another group of families refused to sign the decision and went to the Giza Education Directorate.
She tells Zawia3: “The decision will impose great hardship on our children, whose ages do not exceed five years and a few months, and will saddle us with financial burdens because of the daily transport fares to and from school. The pledge obliges us to a certain attendance rate, otherwise the pupils will be transferred to Arabic government schools. Is this what is meant to be implemented?”
She adds: “There is poor distribution: pupils from Warraq were accepted in the Agouza administration, pupils from Agouza in the Faisal administration, and pupils from Haram in 6th of October. While there are 8 sectors in the October Educational Administration, the placement system showed me only two schools when I submitted my daughter’s file, and I was surprised to find 30 pupils from the Haram Educational Administration accepted at the school near our home. There is a new school west of the airport which, if it were opened, would solve the problem of overcrowded classes.”
A Shortage of Classrooms and School Seats
For his part, Said Attia, director of the Giza Directorate of Education, affirms to Zawia3 that priority in fee-paying education (experimental schools) is determined according to the criterion of age: pupils joining kindergarten who are 6 years old minus one day are placed first in experimental schools within their residential block, then children younger than that, gradually, so that priority goes to the older age. He explains that the directorate placed 10,000 pupils in 85 schools in Giza according to the residential block to which they belong, while 8,000 pupils were left without places in schools last year because there were no vacant seats in the schools around them. When parents demanded that the pupils be enrolled in schools in any educational administration so that they would not lose the school year, the directorate was forced to place 8,000 kindergarten pupils in schools with vacant seats, in administrations such as El-Saff and Atfih, so as not to have to increase class density in the experimental schools located in the residential blocks to which the pupils belong, which would harm the educational process and affect pupils’ comprehension.
The director of the directorate explains that the Ministry of Education is working on building new schools in Giza Governorate in several administrations, most importantly Haram, Bulaq and October, to solve the shortage of classrooms and school seats. However, he considers that the idea of applying an evening shift at experimental schools, one of the solutions proposed by parents, is difficult to apply to official language schools because their curricula are larger than those of their government (Arabic) counterparts, so the school day is longer to accommodate the subjects, and that if an evening shift were applied, pupils would return home late.
He tells Zawia3: “Parents of kindergarten pupils in fee-paying schools who are affected by placement in schools far from the residential block can resort to modifying their preference through the placement website and transferring their children to distinguished official language schools within the residential block, or wait until applications to schools open next June and apply for their children at an Arabic government school near their place of residence,” stressing that school attendance is compulsory under the new education system, which rules out the possibility of absence for pupils placed in schools far from their residential blocks.
The government official reveals that the Giza Directorate of Education resorted to obliging the parents of kindergarten pupils in fee-paying schools, whose placement decision was issued within the sixth stage of placement, to sign pledges committing them not to transfer their children from the schools in which they were placed throughout the kindergarten and primary stages, to ensure that parents would not demand, as soon as they registered their children in those schools, their transfer to other schools within their residential block. He justifies this by the absence of vacant seats in those schools and by the number of sixth-stage pupils, 8,000 pupils, of whom no more than 500 can be transferred, while the rest must wait until the new schools being built in Giza Governorate open, affirming that the pledge is a precautionary measure and will be kept in the pupil’s file, while the parent can resort to electronic transfer through the placement website using the student’s code, as the pledge does not affect that possibility.
For his part, Shady Zalta, the official spokesperson of the Ministry of Education, explained that the high-density governorates, and the place that is the subject of the complaint is Giza Governorate, have 98 schools, 85 of them official language schools and 13 distinguished official language schools, and that placement is carried out on the basis of age order from oldest to youngest and according to student density. He explained, during a phone-in with presenter Lamees El-Hadidi on the programme “Kelma Akhira” on ON channel, that this year the ministry applied a system of reducing student density in a single class so that it does not exceed 50 students, which reduces the student’s opportunities to benefit and may lead to non-attendance, and therefore there is a commitment to class densities, and placement is accordingly carried out at the level of all directorates, not Giza only. He noted that the current year saw five stages of placement within Giza Governorate or the Giza Education Directorate, and the last stage was the one under which students were distributed to different districts such as Atfih and El-Saff, to ensure that students do not exceed the legal age.
According to the Egypt Projects Map website, Giza Governorate saw the opening of 8 new schools at the start of the 2019/2020 school year, at a total cost of EGP 48,880,000, as part of the state’s plan to reduce student overcrowding, and ahead of the 2023 – 2024 school year, 11 new schools were built at a cost of EGP 222,600,000 with a total of 367 classrooms, and 9 schools saw expansions and additional storeys at a cost of EGP 65 million with a total of 207 classrooms.
An Unconstitutional Decision
Education expert Dr Kamal Mogheeth, a member of the National Centre for Educational Research, considers the decision forcing pupils’ parents to have their children placed in schools far from their homes to be unconstitutional and illegal, as it denies pupils the right to change the type of education or the school according to what suits their family’s circumstances and place of residence, and he advises affected parents to turn to the Supreme Constitutional Court to annul the decision.
Mogheeth notes, in statements to Zawia3, that the Minister of Education comes from a background in private education, being the son of the owner of the Nermine Ismail schools, and that measures should have been taken to prevent a conflict of interest and sever his connection with private education, so that educational administrations would not be accused of pressuring families to turn to private education. He points out that the government has not complied with the level of spending on education stipulated in Article 19 of the Constitution, set at 4% of gross national product, which amounts to EGP 800 billion, while the state spends around EGP 230 billion; if the prescribed share were applied, the Ministry of Education would be able to build new schools and solve the teacher shortage, which reaches 600,000 teachers.
For his part, human rights lawyer Malek Adly, director of the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, believes that a crime is being committed against the pupils and their families, and that the state’s obligation to provide education suited to the circumstances of children, their bodies and their families is a constitutional obligation that cannot be waived. He explains that the state is supposed to attend to building new schools and hospitals instead of focusing on roads and bridges, and that this is the right of taxpayers.
He tells Zawia3: “It is not logical for a 5-year-old child to have to travel a road around 100 kilometres long every day to go to kindergarten. I advise affected parents to turn to the Public Prosecution and the State Council, because they are being forced to commit a crime against their children, which constitutes a violation of children’s rights, and the Ministry of Education must provide school seats in schools close to the pupils’ residential areas.”
Article 19 of the Egyptian Constitution stipulates that education is a right of every citizen, aimed at building the Egyptian character, preserving national identity, rooting the scientific method in thinking, developing talents and encouraging innovation, consolidating civilisational and spiritual values, and establishing the concepts of citizenship, tolerance and non-discrimination. The state is committed to observing its goals in educational curricula and methods and to providing it in accordance with international quality standards. Education is compulsory until the end of the secondary stage or its equivalent, and the state guarantees that it is free of charge in its various stages in state educational institutions, in accordance with the law.
Parliamentary Intervention
The crisis over the placement of the pupils of the sixth stage of kindergarten placement, and the parents’ appeals for help, prompted MP Nashwa El-Deeb, representative of the Imbaba constituency, to intervene in an attempt to find a solution to the crisis in coordination with the Ministry of Education.
She tells Zawia3: “I contacted the Governor of Giza and the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education about the crisis, and it was agreed to extend the pupils’ registration period and not to force their parents to sign the pledges not to transfer, by Thursday 29 May at the latest, and a meeting is to be held between me, the director of the Educational Buildings Authority, the Governor of Giza and the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education on the same day to discuss the available options, so that pupils and their parents are spared the ordeal of the daily journey to and from schools far from their residential block.”
She adds: “There are proposed solutions that I intend to present to the Minister of Education, most notably: allocating the new schools whose construction has been completed in Giza as official language schools and transferring the sixth-stage pupils to them, each according to the residential block nearest to them; making an inventory of low-density government (Arabic) schools and adding experimental annexes to them; or merging the pupils of every two low-density government schools into one school and converting the other into an experimental school.”
Between government promises to close the classroom shortage and the measures the Ministry of Education describes as “precautionary”, thousands of parents in Giza Governorate stand before an impossible equation: either sacrifice their children’s comfort and physical and psychological safety on long daily journeys and bear additional economic burdens because of transport fares, or deprive them of the opportunity of a good education within their financial means. Amid this, hope still hangs on a genuine response to the families’ demands, one that starts from their reality and from their children’s rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution and the law.
Editorial correction: The first version of the report stated that Article 19 of the Constitution sets the share of spending on education at 4% of domestic product; in fact, it obliges the state to a share of no less than 4% of gross national product, according to the text of Article 19 of the 2014 Constitution.
