MENA Bridge · Market Research
Jordan Educational Sector Tracker
School supply, enrolment and where classroom capacity actually sits — with the building-tenure split that shows which governorates are teaching in premises never designed for it.
Students
2,309,874 2024/25
▲ 0.12% vs 2023/24
Private share of students
26.05% 2024/25
▼ 0.2 pp vs 2015/16
Students per class unit
24.58 2024/25
▼ 0.29 pp vs 2015/16
Rented share of schools
33.2% 2024/25
▲ 0.5 pp vs 2021/22
Students per school
299.9 2024/25
▲ 27.1 pp vs 2015/16
Private universities’ share of enrolment
33.6% 2024/25
of 435,947 bachelor’s students
Data labels
Supply and enrolment
Every series here runs on the longest window its own source publishes, so the four charts do not share a start year — the window is named on each. All four are split the same way, across the Ministry of Education, private schools, UNRWA and other government authorities.
Students by supervising authority
Academic 2015/16 to 2024/25. Ministry of Education enrolment peaked in 2020/21 and has fallen since.
Schools by supervising authority
Academic 2014/15 to 2024/25.
Class units by supervising authority
Academic 2013/14 to 2024/25 — the longest series in the chapter.
Teachers by supervising authority
Academic 2014/15 to 2024/25.
One figure the sources disagree on. The 2022 DoS edition prints 86,788 class units for 2021/22 in table 13.1.1 and 86,789 in its own table 13.1.6; the Ministry of Education report agrees with 86,789. Both are reproduced as published; neither has been corrected.
The private sector
The single most misread series in Jordanian education statistics. Read on a short window it looks like rapid private-sector growth; read on the full decade it is a collapse and a recovery.
Private share of schools and of students
Academic 2015/16 to 2024/25. The gap between the two lines is the average-school-size story.
Students per school, private against Ministry
The same two sectors, measured by how many students each school holds.
Reading these two charts
The upper line is the private sector’s share of schools; the lower one its share of students. Private schools are 44.0% of all schools but teach only 26.1% of students, because they are much smaller — 177.3 students each against 386.6 in a Ministry school.
What matters is the shape, not the level. Private share sat near 26.5% through the second half of the 2010s, fell to 20.4% in 2020/21 — about 124,561 students moved out of private schools and into Ministry ones in a single year — and has climbed back to 26.1%. Over the whole decade the share has moved −0.2 pp. The private sector has recovered its position, not expanded it.
The structural change is size. Students per private school went 163.5 → 151.2 at the trough → 177.3 now, well above where it started. The same share of students sits in proportionally fewer, larger private schools — consolidation, not expansion.
What would change this reading: a further year of rising share above 26.5% would be genuine share-taking rather than recovery.
Students by educational stage and authority
Academic 2024/25, stacked by authority. Stage names follow the Ministry of Education’s own English — basic education runs grades 1 to 10, secondary grades 11 and 12. The international column first appears in the 2024 edition, so it is not comparable with earlier years.
A note on the stage names. The Ministry of Education’s Education Law sets three cycles in English: the pre-school (kindergarten) cycle, the basic education cycle of ten years, and the secondary education cycle of two. Jordanian schools commonly split basic education into primary and preparatory years, but the published statistics do not, so this page keeps the official cycle and states the grades it covers. The Law also treats comprehensive secondary as the stream that contains the academic and vocational specialisations; the Department of Statistics reports them as separate columns, and they are shown here as reported.
Where the students are
Twelve governorates and thirty-nine directorates, academic 2024/25. Class density and students per teacher are derived from the published counts, not taken from a published ratio.
Students by governorate
Share of the Kingdom’s 2,309,874 students. Amman alone holds 36.4%.
Share of students by governorate
Academic 2024/25. Each share is printed beside its own slice, so the chart carries no legend. The 7 smallest governorates are grouped into one slice — twelve labels cannot be placed around a pie without colliding, and the map beside it carries every governorate on its own.
Students per class unit
The crowding measure: students divided by class units.
Students per teacher
The staffing measure, on the same twelve governorates.
Reading these three charts
Class density and students per teacher answer different questions. Density is about rooms — how many children share a class unit. Students per teacher is about staffing.
Nationally a class unit holds 24.58 students. The spread runs from 27.9 in Zarqa down to 19.3 in Ma'an. A governorate high on density and low on students per teacher has a buildings problem, not a staffing one — and that is the case the next section is about.
School buildings — owned against rented
A rented school sits in premises never designed to be one. This is the most direct purpose-built-school demand signal in Jordanian official statistics, and it is the only place this tracker crosses building tenure with geography.
Rented share of schools by governorate
Academic 2024/25, all authorities together.
Rented share within each sector
The same governorates, split between Ministry and private schools.
Rented share over the four published editions
Academic 2021/22 to 2024/25.
Reading this chart
33.2% of Jordan’s schools are in rented premises in 2024/25, and the figure has moved +0.5 pp across the four published editions — this is a stock that changes slowly.
The two sectors are not alike. 18.0% of Ministry schools are rented against 52.3% of private ones, so the private sector carries most of the tenure risk and most of the demand for purpose-built stock.
Geographically the range runs from 37.9% in Amman down to 10.5% in Aqaba. A high rented share alongside high class density marks a governorate teaching in premises that were not built for it.
What this is not: a measure of school quality, and not a count of buildings — a school is an institution, and two can share one building.
Higher education
A single academic year. The Department of Statistics added its higher-education tables in the 2025 edition, so there is no earlier year to compare against and nothing here is a trend.
One year only. Every chart in this section carries academic 2024/25 and no other. The next edition, expected in 2027, gives these series their second point. The Ministry of Higher Education is not the source — its own statistics stop at 2019–20; these come from the Department of Statistics.
Bachelor’s enrolment, the fifteen largest institutions
Academic 2024/25. 435,954 bachelor’s students across 41 universities and academies.
Bachelor’s enrolment by university sector
Government, private, regional and universities established under a special law.
Enrolment by programme, and the female share
The twelve largest programmes.
Retention
Dropouts from basic education, grades 1 to 10. Three editions carry the table; the 2022 edition does not publish it at all.
Dropouts by grade
Academic 2022/23 · 2023/24 · 2024/25.
Read this one carefully. Basic-education dropouts fall from 11,720 in 2023/24 to 6,089 in 2024/25, a change of −48.0% in a single year — and in the same edition the table’s title changed from “repeaters and dropouts” to “dropouts”. The figures reconcile internally and are reproduced as published, but MENA Bridge cannot say from the chapter alone whether this is a real improvement in retention or a change in what is counted, and it should not be read as a trend until a further year is published.
Not published, and therefore not shown: the number of Jordanians enrolled at universities abroad. The Department of Statistics lists twenty academic years for it and prints a figure for only nine of them, the most recent being 2018/19; academic 2024/25 is blank. There is no current figure to report.
Sources
Every figure on this page is derived at build time from the documents below. Nothing is typed into the text.
| Publisher | Document | What it supplies | Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Department of Statistics, Jordan | Jordan Statistical Yearbook, Education chapter, editions 2022–2025 | Schools, class units, students and teachers by supervising authority, educational stage and level; governorate and directorate detail; building tenure; dropouts; higher education | Academic 2021/22 to 2024/25 |
| Ministry of Education, Jordan | Annual Statistical Report 2024/2025 | The multi-year comparison tables behind every long series on this page, and the crossing of school building tenure with governorate | Academic 2024/25 |