Significant reductions in the costs of secondary begin to appear after 2000 as the
reduced cohort moves through the simulated system. In this model the proportion of the
government recurrent budget that would need to be allocated to education in 2005
reduces by about 15% as a result of slower population growth. These effects are
cumulative and ultimately, when the model returns to equilibrium, costs will grow at
the new rate of population growth.
Reductions in population growth rate therefore ease the financial burdens of increased
access to education and improve school age dependency rates. In those countries with
very high growth rates and much lower expectations of economic growth, improving
access to schools and preventing reductions in the per student expenditure on education
are only likely to be possible if population growth rates moderate.
1.3.2 Fertility and health
Population growth rates are closely related to fertility rates on the one hand and child
survival rates on the other. A considerable body of research suggests that it is the
education of females that has one of the strongest impacts on family size and on the
nutritional and health status of children. More educated mothers tend to have smaller
families, at least above certain thresholds of educational level (Cochrane 1979, Birdsall
1988). Claims that a secondary education for females reduces the average number of
children from 7 to 3 (World Bank 1992:8) may be over optimistic but the direction of
the association is no longer disputed. It may be that the conventional economic
explanation stands up to analysis - that more educated women pay off higher child
quality with child quantity recognising the opportunity costs of increased family size on
quality, and are more efficient users of contraceptives and more productive in ensuring
the quality of their siblings. This narrow view does not seem sufficient to explain the
wide variety of forms that the association between maternal education and smaller
family size appears to take. It is also noted elsewhere that there is an established
relationship between enrolment disparities between boy and girls and overall low
enrolment ratios. Closing this gap, by enrolling more girls, would potentially have the
double benefit of increasing participation for what is in many countries one of the most
educational underprivileged groups, and subsequently reducing the rate of growth of the
school age population. These issues are discussed further in the section below on the
education of girls and women.
Changes in the health status of children also have an impact on the number of school
age children in ways which are likely to be complex. If more children survive the size
of the age cohort will increase and if morbidity diminishes school attendance rates are
likely to improve. Greater survival rates may encourage some parents to have fewer
children. Which effect is dominant will depend on the interaction of several factors
cultural, economic, access to family planning etc.