Adjusted for inflation, the budget of Argentina’s Education Secretariat has dropped to its lowest point in nearly 20 years, according to a new report.
According to calculations by the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ), when adjusted to 2025 prices, the Secretariat received 6.5 trillion pesos in 2006 and 5.3 trillion in 2025, well below the highs of 2017 (10.7 trillion pesos) and 2023 (11.2 trillion pesos).
Although the government launched the National Literacy Plan in 2024 and insisted that education would be a priority, Argentina’s teacher training programme now has its smallest budget since 2008, the first year ACIJ tracked it. At 2025 prices, it stood at 46.32 billion pesos in 2008; this year it is 9.77 billion pesos.
The Teaching Salary Compensation Fund was one of the hardest-hit areas. Created in 2005 to help raise the salary floor in poorer provinces, it has dropped from 1.47 trillion pesos a decade ago to just 1 billion pesos today – and, as Perfil verified, none of that amount has yet been spent. Funding for the construction of nursing schools also fell sharply, from 42 billion pesos in 2016 to 14 billion pesos as of November 2025.
Article 9 of Argentina’s National Education Law states that the State must guarantee system funding and that the education budget must not fall below six percent of Gross Domestic Product. However, a report by Argentinos por la Educación notes that this target was met only in 2015, with the shortfall between 2006 and 2020 amounting to sme five percent of GDP.
The organisation added that the 2026 draft Budget drafted by the Executive Branch – now awaiting approval or rejection in Congress – seeks to repeal Article 9, removing the legal obligation to allocate at least six percent of GDP to education.
The same report says that investment in education recovered gradually after 2020, reaching 1.41 percent in 2023, before falling again in 2024 to 0.86 percent. Forecasts for the end of 2025 and projections for 2026 “anticipate this trend deepening,” says the report, “with investment in education and culture falling to 0.73 percent and 0.75 percent of GDP respectively.”
The document also reviews the 2026 Budget. For next year, the Secretariat’s nominal budget variation is 17.9 percent. Given the inflation estimate used in the draft budget, this amounts to real growth of 3.6 percent – or 0.1 percent if measured against the Central Bank’s REM market expectations survey, leaving “a very narrow margin for real increase,” the report states.
Press reports this week suggested that the government is working on the repeal of the current Education Law. Draft proposals would include remote teaching, teacher evaluations and allowing provinces to introduce religious and confessional content in state schools.
When consulted, the Human Capital Ministry said that, “as with the employment reform, this is being worked on within the May Council with absolute discretion.” The rest, they said, “are journalistic operations,” adding that the portfolio had nothing further to comment on because the process takes place “in a closed and reserved environment.”
The original draft of the ‘Ley de Bases’ mega-reform package submitted by the Executive Branch to Congress in December 2023 incorporated “hybrid and remote” teaching as an “alternative to classroom teaching” from the second cycle of primary school onwards..
It also proposed regular evaluations for teachers through exams certifying skills and knowledge. These evaluations would become a condition and an incentive for employment, with competencies to be revalidated every five years.
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