From Population Growth to Demographic Scarcity: Emerging Challenges to Global Primary Education Provision in the Twenty-first Century

Demographic pressures are reshaping the challenges faced by primary education systems around the world in ways that carry significant implications for the landscape of global educational inequality. We first demonstrate highly disequalizing demographic pressures on the world's educational systems today: persistent expansionary pressures burden some of the world's least-resourced educational systems, while such pressures are reversing in educational systems that include some of the world’s most high-performing on comparative assessments. Second, we describe national system responses to changing numbers of children around the world. Surprisingly, despite highly disequalizing demographic pressures, evidence shows a global converging trend in child-teacher ratios. However, distinct patterns in primary school size have emerged as child populations plateau and decline and decisions are made about system consolidation. Finally, within countries, system consolidation can introduce new salience to geospatial hierarchies. We illustrate this point with the case of Korea, a country at the forefront of the trend toward demographic scarcity, where non-metropolitan areas bore the brunt of past primary school closures and teacher losses while metropolitan areas saw increases in schools and teachers, despite student declines. We argue that demographic pressures and associated policy responses constitute an essential yet neglected research agenda for understanding global educational inequalities.