Poverty, child labor, and child marriage partially behind Iran’s unfilled classrooms

Rezvan Hakimzadeh, deputy minister of primary education, confirmed that 140,562 students were identified as not attending school last year.

Thousands of primary school-aged children in Iran have been unable to receive an education due to financial hardship, Iran’s Education Ministry confirmed to Iranian media on Tuesday.

Rezvan Hakimzadeh, deputy minister of primary education, confirmed that 140,562 students were identified as not attending school last year, with the majority located in Sistan and Baluchestan, Tehran, Razavi Khorasan and Khuzestan provinces. Of those children, 54,445 were in the first grade of primary school.

The minister confirmed that nearly 42,000 of the students were found to have left Iran with their families, while 18,000 were not required to enroll due to disabilities. Thousands of others were found to be out of school due to family financial hardship, child labor, a lack of adequate guardianship, or enrollment in unlicensed education centers.

There were also 86 cases in which a primary school-aged child was not attending school because they had married. Primary school in Iran is for children aged six to 12 years, while Iranian law generally requires girls to be 13 and boys to be 15 to marry, although a judge’s approval can allow for marriage at a younger age.

The start of the school year in Iran has also drawn greater attention to the country’s population crisis. According to the Astan Quds Razavi foundation-affiliated Iranian media site Quds Online, only 1.154 million six-year-old children began primary school in Iran this year, a decrease of around 76,000 from last year.

Iran's challenged demography

Iran’s declining birth rates, delays in marriage and childbearing, economic pressures, and lifestyle changes have all impacted the country’s demography.

Alireza Sajedi, head of Iran’s Population Monitoring Center of the National Organization for Civil Registration, also complained to the site that the number of births fell from around 1.116 million in 2021 to fewer than 980,000 in 2024.

The population decline could eventually lead schools to reduce both classroom sizes and the number of classes in cities, but in rural areas, it may no longer be viable to keep schools open, Quds Online warned.