An audit conducted by the Valsts kontrole (State Audit Office) has found that children in Latvia are not guaranteed equal opportunities to receive quality basic education, auditors report.
Although the country has a unified basic education standard and schools are accredited, the scope of teaching, assessment approaches and availability of support services vary significantly between schools, affecting students’ academic performance and their ability to continue education at the next level.
As of the 1st of October 2025, more than 183,600 students were enrolled in basic education programmes across 583 schools in Latvia. Municipal spending on general education has increased in recent years to more than 900 million euros, yet this has not ensured equal quality across all schools, the auditors concluded.
The audit found that the basic education standard allows wide deviations in the number of lessons devoted to individual subjects and in their implementation. As a result, the number of mathematics lessons can differ by as much as 750 hours between schools, significantly affecting students’ preparedness, including for centralised examinations.
Moreover, in practice even the planned number of lessons is often not delivered.
Over a three-year period, up to 46% fewer mathematics lessons were held than scheduled, up to 27% fewer in Latvian language, and up to 24% fewer in English.
In Grade 9 examination subjects, lesson numbers may be increased by up to 40%. At the same time, lesson hours in other subjects are often significantly reduced. For example, the number of lessons in design and technology may be cut by half, in social studies and history by 14% — and in some cases by as much as two-thirds — and in computer science by up to 40%. The standard also permits subject integration, whereby subjects are incorporated into others; the audit identified cases where certain subjects were fully integrated.
Such insufficiently supervised flexibility creates a situation in which students’ knowledge and skills largely depend on decisions made by individual schools, auditors note. Data on changes in lesson numbers and subject integration are not publicly available, meaning students and their legal guardians are generally not informed of these differences when choosing a school.
The State Audit Office also highlighted problems in assessing student performance.
Schools lack a unified and effective system for timely identification of students’ strengths and weaknesses. For three academic years, no national diagnostic or monitoring assessments were provided for Grades 3 and 6 to objectively evaluate student achievement.
An increasing number of municipalities have begun developing their own diagnostic assessments, which auditors view positively. However, this has resulted in inefficiency, with nearly half of municipalities spending their own resources to create separate solutions, even though a unified national-level instrument had originally been planned.
The so-called formative assessment approach — evaluating student performance without grades during daily learning — was also criticised. While its aim is to provide feedback on learning progress and future tasks, schools do not apply it consistently across all subjects. In many cases, formative assessment is conducted only shortly before tests, thereby losing the opportunity to provide timely support.
The availability of support staff was identified as particularly problematic.
Auditors calculated that, on average, a student receives only 14 to 18 minutes of psychological support per week and approximately 11 minutes of speech therapist support. There is also no assurance that the new funding model, “Programme in School,” is based on students’ actual support needs or that state funding ensures a sufficient number of specialists.
The school accreditation system was also critically assessed. Regardless of evaluation results, schools are accredited for six years, which does not protect children from prolonged study in schools with significant deficiencies, auditors explained.
The State Audit Office noted that education development planning in Latvia is fragmented. Monitoring tools for education quality developed with European Union funding are still not fully operational in practice.
The Audit Office has issued ten recommendations to the Ministry of Education and Science, to be implemented by 2031. These aim to improve oversight of lesson volumes, the provision of support staff, the introduction of diagnostic assessments and the school accreditation system.
From the 1st of September 2024, municipalities are required to develop education ecosystem development strategies. The audit found that methodological support and digital tools for drafting these strategies have not been sufficiently provided. As a result, several municipalities have outsourced strategy preparation, spending nearly half a million euros. According to the auditors, the majority of these contracts were awarded to a single company.
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