Education in Colombia

When children in Colombia learn how to read and write, they are usually transferred to the elementary school.

The net primary enrollment (percentage of relevant age-group) attending elementary school (primaria) in 2001 totaled 89.5 percent.

Decades after the model was first developed in 1975, Escuela Nueva has received support — including financial — from the Colombian government, Unesco, and The World Bank, and was implemented into a national educational policy in Colombia in the late 1980s.

Escuela Nueva has now expanded internationally to 17 countries, including Brazil, the Philippines and India, benefiting more than five million children.

The upper-secondary education (usually beginning at the age of 15 or 16) offers many different "tracks", which all lead to their own "Bachiller" after a curriculum of two years.

Nonetheless, technical and professional institutions of higher Education can also welcome students with a "qualification in Arts and business".

It provides a degree of technical education: skills and talents to improve the level of subsistence.

Education for employment involves technical skills for work through the formation of "labor competences", which is a Colombian strategy to standardize and certify human resource, expanding and diversify the formation and training of human resources.

Text taken from Comparative review of National Mobile Learning Initiatives in Latin America: The cases of Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay.