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Data

Official entrance age to pre-primary education

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Global Education

What you should know about this indicator

  • Children begin their education journeys at different ages around the world — this indicator shows the age at which they are officially expected to start pre-primary education in a given country.
  • It captures the official entrance age for pre-primary education, based on the assumption that children begin schooling at the standard age, attend full-time, and progress through the education system without repeating or skipping any grades.
  • The official entrance age is typically set by national education laws or regulations and often corresponds to the most common age at which children enter pre-primary programmes.
  • This indicator helps estimate the expected demand for early childhood education services and is a key input for producing many other education statistics, including enrolment rates and school-age population estimates.
  • The data are reported by ministries of education and compiled by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, using the International Standard Classification of Education (International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED)) to ensure international comparability.
  • While the official age provides a national benchmark, actual entry ages may vary due to cultural preferences, availability of early childhood programmes, or local policy flexibility.
  • Understanding the official entrance age to pre-primary education is essential for education planning and for identifying gaps in access to early learning opportunities that support school readiness and long-term development.

Age at which students would enter pre-primary education.

Official entrance age to pre-primary education
TThe official entry age at which children are expected to start according to national legislation or policies.
Source
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 1, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1970–2024
Unit
years

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is the official and trusted source of internationally-comparable data on education, science, culture and communication. As the official statistical agency of UNESCO, the UIS produces a wide range of state-of-the-art databases to fuel the policies and investments needed to transform lives and propel the world towards its development goals. The UIS provides free access to data for all UNESCO countries and regional groupings from 1970 to the most recent year available.

Retrieved on
May 1, 2025
Retrieved from
https://databrowser.uis.unesco.org/resources/bulk
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Education, https://uis.unesco.org/bdds, 2025

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Official entrance age to pre-primary education”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Natasha Ahuja, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2023) - “Global Education”. Data adapted from UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/official-entrance-age-to-pre-primary-education [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – processed by Our World in Data. “Official entrance age to pre-primary education” [dataset]. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, “UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) - Education” [original data]. Retrieved May 14, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/official-entrance-age-to-pre-primary-education