Education structure and enrollment
The Egyptian education system starts at the pre-primary level. Nevertheless, mandatory education begins from the six years of primary education at the age of six, followed by three years of preparatory and three years of secondary. Among all education levels, primary schooling was the most crowded, with nearly 13.7 million students. Preparatory level students followed at around 5.8 million in 2021/2022. Regarding higher education, around 3.5 million students chose to continue studying after compulsory schooling, mostly in public universities.In addition, the country has a religious teaching system called Al-Azhar that runs parallel to the public system and is independent of the Ministry of Education. The number of students in these schools followed the same trend as the general governmental schooling system, with over 1.21 million students at the elementary level.