Issues
Decentralization - As a result of the State administration established by the Dayton Peace Agreement, the education system, as other social sectors, is governed by 13 Ministries of Education, each having its separate legislative and executive roles. Division of education based on ethnic grounds - The phenomena of “two schools under one roof” is perhaps the most vivid example of segregation in schools in BIH. Still, in many of the neighbouring schools, children are separated by religious/cultural principles as well as the teachers that teach them, having no mutual contact. Students of different religions/cultural backgrounds often enter the same school building through separate entrances and have separate breaks while teachers of different backgrounds do not use the same teachers’ room. Enrollment and drop-out - With some 40 percent of population estimated to be under or just above the poverty line, and with the rising costs of education (based on curricula requirements), increasing numbers of families are not able to meet all education requirements for their children. The study on the government enrolment monitoring system indicates that there is no system that connects the birth registration, residence registration and the school enrollment.
Education of Roma children. The Roma community in BIH suffers from a legacy of discrimination that has contributed to widespread poverty, unemployment, homelessness and a lack of access to education. Currently, the presence of Roma in schools is sporadic at best and Romani children are almost 100 percent absent in the later grades of primary and secondary schools. Even though there are several good examples of local level action for enrolment of Roma children in schools, they should not obscure the fact that the approach to the question of Roma is disparate across the country. No attempt has been made neither to enable the teaching of Romani language nor to ensure that the content of the curricula addresses the needs of children belonging to national minorities, despite calls from the state-level Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees to this end. Children with special needs.Given the absence of State standard-setting structures such as a Curriculum agency or a Standards and Assessment Agency, even when lower-level legislation is passed, large disparities often exist in implementation of key provisions the "Action plan for Inclusion of Children with Special Needs" into mainstream education that was developed in 2005 and of the Education framework law. Currently, though pupils in some parts of the BH benefit from mobile expert teams (RS and Tuzla Canton), programmes designed to help parents and other pupils as well as professional development programmes for teachers do not exist. Rather, the education of children with special needs is still primarily carried out in specialized institutions. This haphazard approach means that programmes vary greatly in the learning outcomes they enable children with special needs to achieve. Access of children with physical disability has not yet been resolved by removing physical barriers to their access to school buildings.
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