What if the actual age of school entry has nothing to do with the rules?

While writing a different article, I wanted to use Indonesia as an example. However, for that purpose I noticed that even though the official school entry age was 7, in reality entry by age 6 was much more typical, whichever data source you look at. This observation started out as a footnote in a draft for that other paper, but fully analysing the situation, and – more importantly – thinking through its implications made for an article all in itself, that I finally finished together with Stephanie Bengtsson.

We demonstrate that while at first glance it might seem like a technical detail, it is far from clear, either statistically or normatively in terms of policy, how to deal with such a situation where educational reality is entirely divorced from the official rules.

This article was just published in Comparative Education and is Open Access!