The age of compulsory education, a moving boundary

French law speaks of compulsory instruction, not compulsory schooling: the obligation bears on the child being educated, whether in an institution or, under conditions, at home. The distinction is old and structures the whole legal regime.

Lowering the age from six to three, in force from the 2019 school year, had limited statistical effect since virtually all three-year-olds were already in school. Its main effect lay elsewhere, notably on the funding of private nursery schools under contract, which municipalities must now support.

Starting ages range from four, notably in Northern Ireland, to seven in several Nordic and Eastern European countries. Most countries set the threshold at five or six.

Those gaps do not measure how early formal learning begins. Countries with a late threshold often have widely attended preschool provision, free or cheap, but not compulsory: the children are there without the law requiring it.

An abundant literature compares systems with early and late entry into formal reading instruction. International attainment comparisons show no durable advantage for early systems by adolescence.

Those comparisons are fragile: countries differ in far more than starting age, and attributing a gap in results to that single variable is an inference the authors themselves advise against.

Another literature exploits birth dates. Within a single country, children born just before and just after the enrolment cut-off start school almost a year apart. These studies find an advantage for the oldest in the class, which tends to fade over the years without always disappearing.

The French regime changed in 2021: home education, until then subject to declaration, moved to prior authorisation granted on an exhaustively listed set of grounds.

The Constitutional Council upheld the scheme, and the Council of State subsequently specified how applications are to be assessed. Neighbouring countries present opposite regimes, from near-total prohibition in Germany to a widely open practice in the United Kingdom.

The 2021 reform was adopted as part of the law reinforcing respect for the principles of the Republic, which placed the question within a debate broader than education alone. Its supporters saw it as a necessary check, its opponents as the restriction of a freedom until then lightly regulated.

The existence of a legal obligation says nothing about actual attendance or the quality of provision. Instruments for tracking absenteeism differ so much between countries that no direct comparison is published.

What the obligation does create is an administrative point of entry: it makes the child visible to public services, a function several child protection studies regard as its most tangible effect.