Lower secondary education is pivotal in efforts to raise productivity through the development of human resources. Once universal primary education has been achieved, attention tends to turn to making lower secondary education compulsory,
because this level of education is considered essential in order to function effectively in a modern economy and society. It is also the level that prepares students to proceed to upper secondary and tertiary education. This paper deals with the efforts to reach universal lower secondary education in two South-East Asian countries—Thailand and Indonesia. The average educational attainment of the labour force in both countries lags behind that in many of their
neighbours. Both countries have endeavoured during the 1990s to achieve universal lower secondary education. The task has been lightened by the levelling off of numbers entering the ages for lower secondary school, as a result of earlier declines in fertility. Both have made considerable progress but the goal is yet to be reached. The paper traces the history of lower secondary education in both countries, the impact of the post-1997 economic crisis on this level of education, and a number of remaining issues related to the achievement of lower secondary education. These are quality issues, supply and demand factors affecting the attainment of universal lower secondary education, equity of access issues, and ways of raising the educational attainment of those no longer in school. The key challenge is to find the best policy mix to enable lower secondary education of reasonable quality to be made more widely available to poorer and more isolated populations, and to find ways of providing basic education to the adult population who missed out earlier.