School dropout, also combated with healthy meals

The Romanian Government has adopted the Decision on the establishment of the National Program "Healthy Meal" in 2025, an initiative considered by the Minister of Education, Daniel David, a "fundamental mechanism" for reducing school dropout. The program involves the daily provision of a free hot meal or, in cases where this cannot be ensured, a food package. The daily value of the food support is set at 15 lei per beneficiary, an amount that includes value added tax.

The expansion of this program will allow over 500,000 children in the preschool and pre-university education network to have access to adequate nutrition. Minister Daniel David emphasized that the issue of school dropout is a major one in Romania, and social measures play an essential role in preventing and controlling this phenomenon.

The long-term objective is that, by 2029, all primary school students will benefit from the "Healthy Meal" program, thus contributing to ensuring an equitable and accessible education for all children.

Four out of ten middle school children (41%) do not want to go to high school, but to get a job, work in the family or take a qualification course, and approximately half of high school students travel more than an hour round trip to school, according to the report "Well-being of children in rural areas', 2024, World Vision Romania. On the other hand, the Save the Children organization informs that the 2022-2023 school year marked a historic negative point: 16% of middle school-age children and over a quarter (25.03%)5 of high school-age adolescents are outside the education system. Moreover, the early school leaving rate reached 16.6% - the highest level in the last six years, highlighting a worrying trend of deterioration of the education system: over 19,000 primary and secondary school students, as well as over 14,700 high school and vocational education students have left school. The historical disparities between town and country also persist in education, reaching levels that defy fundamental principles of social equity: while developed urban areas register a dropout rate of 3.3%, it increases dramatically to 14.3% in small towns and reaches a catastrophic level of 27.5% in rural areas. In total, almost 34,000 children have given up on compulsory education. Referring to the same age range 7 - 17 years (age reached on 1 January 2024), in Romania, 456,910 children are out of school (2023-2024).