Compulsory Schooling Ends at 10 in One Country and 22 in Another
Combine school starting age with compulsory years and childhood's legal end runs from 10 in Myanmar to 22 in El Salvador. The median is 16.
Combining school starting age with compulsory years of schooling, the age at which mandatory education ends ranges from 10 in Myanmar to 22 in El Salvador across all 194 countries profiled, with a median of 16.
Two facts about schooling get published separately, and almost nobody puts them together.
School starting age runs from 4 to 7. Compulsory years run from 5 to 15. Add them and you get the age at which a country stops legally requiring a child to be in school — and that number ranges from 10 to 22.
The two ends
| Ends latest | Starts | Years | Ends at |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Salvador | 7 | 15 | 22 |
| Israel | 6 | 15 | 21 |
| Mexico | 6 | 15 | 21 |
| Tonga | 6 | 15 | 21 |
| Ends earliest | Starts | Years | Ends at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Myanmar | 5 | 5 | 10 |
| Bangladesh | 6 | 5 | 11 |
| Madagascar | 6 | 5 | 11 |
| Guyana | 6 | 6 | 12 |
The median across all 194 countries is 16.
A twelve-year gap between the two ends is larger than the entire compulsory span in the countries at the bottom. A child in Myanmar has finished mandatory education before a child in El Salvador has reached the halfway point of theirs.
Why the combination matters more than either half
Reported on its own, each figure misleads.
Starting age alone invites the wrong conclusion. The United Kingdom and Ireland start earliest at 4, which sounds like an advantage until you notice that the outcome evidence does not favour the early end — several countries starting at 7 outperform them.
Compulsory years alone hides where the years sit. Fifteen years starting at 6 ends at 21; fifteen years starting at 7 ends at 22. Same mandate, different childhood.
Together they describe something real: the window during which a state considers a person to be a child in education, which is closer to what a family actually experiences than either number alone.
What a mandate does not tell you
This is the part that keeps the table honest.
A law is not attendance. Secondary completion runs from about 9% to over 100% across the 189 countries with a published figure. Several countries with long mandates report low completion, because a requirement without schools, teachers or affordable access is a statement of intent.
A law is not quality. Nothing in the number describes what happens in the years it covers.
A law is not enforcement. There are roughly 250 million children out of school worldwide, many of them in countries whose statutes say they should be in one.
So read the table as a description of policy, not of childhood. The two diverge most in exactly the places where the divergence matters.
The useful reading
If you are comparing education systems, the mandate window is a good first filter and a poor conclusion. Pair it with completion, and the countries where the two disagree sharply are the ones worth looking at closely — a long mandate with low completion is a system under strain, and it is visible in two numbers before it is visible in anything else.
See the underlying figures at compulsory years of schooling by country and school starting age by country, or the completion picture at school enrolment statistics.