Serbia

In the mid-1990s an estimated 31 percent of the age-relevant children were enrolled in preprimary educational institutions in the FRY (Serbia and Montenegro) (i.e., the gross enrollment ratio for preprimary education was 31 percent). As noted above, preprimary education in Serbia is optional. Nonetheless, nearly 165,000 children in Serbia—about 10.5 percent of all children ages 0 to 7—were enrolled in preprimary education in the 1999-2000 school year and taught by 8,134 educators. The ratio of children to educators was reported as 10 to 1 (presumably because preschoolers typically attend half day sessions).

In 1999-2000 about 350,000 pupils were enrolled in lower primary schooling (grades 1-4) and about 380,000 were enrolled in the upper primary grades (grades 5-8) at 3,616 state schools in Serbia, of which 1,443 were full primary schools covering all 8 of the basic education grades. No private primary schools existed in Serbia. With an average pupil to teacher ratio of 16.6, about 44,000 teachers provided primary level instruction in Serbia. Significant differences in class size could be found between village and urban schools with a much lower pupil to teacher ratio in the first four grades of village primary schools than in urban areas. The pupil to teacher ratio for basic education in the FRY as a whole was almost the same: 16.9 in 1997. Few curricular innovations were made in Serbia in the later 1990s at the basic education level except for slight reductions in the number of lessons taught so as to relieve some of the academic pressure on the pupils.

In 1999-2000 almost 287,000 pupils were taught at the primary level in Kosovo, approximately 262,000 of them (91.3 percent) using Albanian, Bosniac, or Turkish as the language of instruction and a little more than 25,000 (8.7 percent) taught in Serbian. Of this 91.3 percent, about 138,000 pupils (52.4 percent of the group) were male and nearly 125,000 (47.6 percent) were female. Of the same 91.3 percent, most (92.3 percent) were taught in Albanian. Late twentieth century estimates indicated that the dropout rate in Kosovo at the primary level was about 6.7 percent; of the 30,000 pupils who enroll in grade 1 each year, only 28,000 were completing their 8 years of primary education. Reportedly 919 schools provided instruction at the primary level, all of them publicly funded, with 15,788 teachers employed. The pupil to teacher ratio was slightly higher in the Albanian language stream (18:1) than in the Turkish and Bosniac streams (16:1) and significantly lower in the Serbian language stream (13:1).