Compulsory education in Belgium: ages 5 to 18

Compulsory education in Belgium runs for thirteen years. It starts with the school year opening in the calendar year the child turns 5, and it ends at the close of the school year in the year they turn 18. It is full-time until 15, part-time after that.

Those two limits are not set by the Community that runs the schools. They are set by the federal parliament, and this is one of the few things the sixth reform of the Belgian state did not move.

Thirteen years, not twelve

Many French-language pages still give the figure of twelve. It was correct until 31 August 2020.

The reference text is article 1, § 1, of the law of 29 June 1983. Its consolidated version now reads "thirteen years" and "five years", where the original read "twelve years" and "six years". That replacement comes from the law of 23 March 2019, in force since 1 September 2020. The upper limit has not moved since 1983: the end of the school year in the year the pupil turns 18.

Who decides the compulsory schooling age?

The federal parliament, and nobody else. It is an exception written in black and white into the Constitution.

Since the constitutional revision of 15 July 1988, education is a Community matter. Curricula, diplomas, teachers, buildings, absence monitoring: all of that belongs to the French Community, the Flemish Community or the German-speaking Community. Article 127, § 1, 2°, of the Constitution nevertheless reserves three matters to the federal authority, and the first of them is precisely setting the start and end of compulsory education. The other two are the minimum conditions for awarding diplomas and the pension scheme for teaching staff.

The consequence is concrete. A Community wishing to lower the entry point to 4 or push the exit to 19 could not do so on its own: it would need a law passed in the federal Chamber of Representatives, applying to all three Communities at once. The 2019 move to age 5 followed exactly that route, before being translated into each Community's own implementing texts, including the decree of 9 July 2020 on the French-speaking side.

That also explains the uniformity of the table below. The ages are identical from one end of the country to the other. The rest is not.

Three Communities, one age bracket

This table reads diagonally. The first three rows are federal and therefore identical; the last two are Community-level and therefore divergent. The most striking point sits in the final row: the 1983 law has been hollowed out by each Community at its own pace, and what survives of it differs from one to the next.

Full-time until 15, part-time after that

The full-time period covers at most seven years of primary education and at least the first two years of full-time secondary education. It ends at 15 once those two years are behind the pupil, passed or not. It never extends beyond 16, even if the path is unfinished.

Then comes the part-time period, up to 18. It can be satisfied in three ways: by continuing full-time secondary, by following a reduced-timetable programme, or by following a training scheme recognised as meeting the requirements of compulsory education. Recognition is not automatic and rests on a minimum number of hours, set in article 2 of the 1983 law: at least 360 hours a year before the year of the pupil's 16th birthday, at least 240 hours a year after that.

One case leaves the system early. A minor who has successfully completed full-time secondary education is no longer subject to compulsory education, whatever their age. A pupil who graduates at 17 is free.

The duty is to receive instruction, not to attend a classroom

The confusion is common, and it clears up on reading paragraph 6 of article 1: compulsory education may also be satisfied through home education. Enrolling a child in a school is not the only lawful route.

In the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, that route runs through a declaration to be filed by 5 September of the school year concerned, renewable every year. It opens a review of the level of study and requires the child to sit the certifying examinations organised by the Federation, starting with the certificate of basic education. The full procedure is set out on the enseignement.be portal.

How many families take that path? In 2024-2025, 3,584 pupils were in home education in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, out of roughly 867,000 pupils. That works out at 0.41 %, about four pupils in every thousand, or one in two hundred and forty. It is a small share of the system, and it has been enough to put the subject on the agenda: in May 2026 the Federation's government adopted at first reading a draft decree that would tighten the declaration conditions, requiring parents to supply a detailed description of the educational project and a training plan for the year.

The text has not been adopted at this stage, and the rest of its parliamentary passage cannot be predicted here.

Which absences count as justified?

Schools keep an attendance register in which every half-day of absence is recorded as justified or unjustified. The list of grounds that bind the head teacher is short, and it is closed.

• Illness, covered by a medical certificate or attestation.
• The death of a parent or relative of the first degree, for four days at most.
• The death of a relative of any degree living under the same roof, for two days; one day only if they lived elsewhere.
• A summons from a public authority, the police for instance.
• Training camps and sessions for pupils recognised as high-level sporting prospects.

Everything else is left to the head teacher's judgement, within a quota of 8 to 16 half-days per school year depending on the school's own rules of procedure. Beyond that, the absence is unjustified, and the counter starts to bite. From the tenth unjustified half-day, the head teacher summons the pupil and those responsible for them by registered letter. From twenty half-days in the second and third stages of secondary education, the pupil loses regular-pupil status and can no longer claim the end-of-year certificate, barring a favourable decision by the class council.

A distinction slips in here, and it is worth stating. Compulsory education (obligation scolaire) covers minors only, and it lapses at the end of the school year of their eighteenth birthday. School attendance (fréquentation scolaire) covers every pupil enrolled in a school, adults included. A pupil repeating a year at 19 is no longer under compulsory education, but remains bound to attend classes regularly for as long as they are enrolled, on pain of losing regular-pupil status and the year with it. The two notions overlap most of the time. They never merge.

What do parents actually risk?

A fine whose size often surprises people by how small it is, and a procedure aimed first at getting the child back to school rather than at punishing.

Article 5 of the law of 29 June 1983, still applicable in the Flemish Community, gives the police court jurisdiction over breaches of the duties in articles 1, 2 and 3, on application by the public prosecutor. It punishes them with a fine of 1 to 25 francs per minor concerned. That franc figure was not converted at the exchange rate: the law of 26 June 2000 on the introduction of the euro provides that amounts subject to the additional tenths are deemed to be expressed directly in euros. Those additional tenths, raised to 70 by the programme law of 25 December 2016, then multiply criminal fines by 8 as of 1 January 2017.

The full calculation therefore gives, per minor, a fine of between 8 and 200 euros.

The second-to-last row says the most about the spirit of the text. Paragraph 3 of article 5 allows enforcement of the judgment to be suspended for six months, and provides that the conviction will be deemed null and void if the law is complied with during that period. The penalty is built as a lever, not as an end point.

On the French-speaking side, that same article 5 was repealed on 1 September 2020 by the decree of 3 May 2019, and truancy handling moved into the Code of basic and secondary education, which favours referral to the Service du Droit à l'instruction (the schooling rights service) and support work before any criminal step. Two Communities, two legal architectures, one age bracket imposed federally.

From 1914 to 2026, a century of shifting limits

Each of the two limits has moved only once since 1914: the upper one in 1983, when the exit went from 14 to 18, the lower one in 2019, when the entry went from 6 to 5. Both times by federal law. The rest of the system, by contrast, has fragmented: monitoring governed by three separate bodies of rules, one 1983 law surviving to varying degrees depending on the language you read it in, and a criminal provision still alive in the north, repealed in the south for the past six years.

Belgian parties take positions regularly on these limits, on compulsory schooling from age 3, on lengthening the common core curriculum or on tightening home education. The ranking and the comparator set out their positions theme by theme; the methodology explains how those positions are collected, and recalls that the published scores describe a position on an axis, never a quality. To work out which assembly decides what in education, the difference between Regions and Communities remains the starting point.

Sources: law of 29 June 1983 on compulsory education, consolidated version with its amendments by Community; Belgian Constitution, article 127, Belgian Senate; law of 23 March 2019 introducing compulsory education from age 5; Ligue de l'Enseignement, compulsory education and the decree of 9 July 2020; enseignement.be, conditions and steps for home education; Bruxelles-J, CEDIEP factsheet on school attendance updated 3 August 2026; SPF Emploi, increase of the additional tenths on 1 January 2017; RTBF, draft decree on monitoring home-educated children, May 2026; law of 19 May 1914 decreeing compulsory instruction.