Azerbaijan

As previously noted, grades five through nine form the "main education" stage of general education in Azerbaijan. Grades 10 and 11 are considered the upper-secondary grades in the country and represent the third stage of compulsory schooling. As with schooling overall in the country during the troubled times of the 1990s, the second and third stages of education suffered from the violence of the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict and the economic problems that beset Azerbaijan as the country shifted from a centralized economy to a free-market economy and came to rely, perhaps too heavily and prematurely, on oil revenues to finance the national budget. Whereas 34 percent of the relevant age group of 15 to 18 year olds had attended upper-secondary school (the final 2 grades of compulsory schooling) in 1990, only 28 percent of the age-relevant group was enrolled in upper-secondary education in 1996. Many students had been displaced or had become refugees during the early part of the 1990s, and the difficult economic conditions led a larger share than normal of secondary school students to drop out of school or be absent for extended periods in order to find work to help support their families.

Vocational Education: Special importance came to be attached to improving the quality of vocational education in Azerbaijan in the transition years of the 1990s, and as already mentioned, the government had begun special initiatives to improve the quality of vocational training with new legislation in 1996. In 1999 over 23,000 Azerbaijani students were enrolled in a total of 108 vocational institutions (including 61 vocational schools and 47 vocational lycées) that provided training in 120 professions. The number of educational staff in these institutions was 5,136 of whom 1,990 were teachers and 1,806 were production training masters. In addition to the vocational schools and lycées already mentioned, 11 evening correspondence schools, plus correspondence groups and 2,137 evening classes given at day schools, provided continuing education opportunities for more than 40,000 youth in their late teens at the start of the new millennium.