Some 60 miles south of São Paulo, aviation manufacturer Embraer has taken the training of its future recruits into its own hands. The company, which services the commercial, corporate and defence markets, is one of the country's largest exporters and has complained that the public education system in Brazil is in such disarray that it decided to fund its own school, catering for 600 of the best-performing students aged between 15 and 18 from low-income families. It has expressed hope that the school may provide the government with a template for what could be achieved.
Engineering conglomerate Randon, which makes components such as brake pads and suspension systems, is so concerned about the shortage of qualified workers that it pays students half their university fees in the hope of persuading them to join the company when they graduate. It also funds an automotive engineering course at the University of Campinas. The mining group Vale and oil firm Petrobras also spend millions on education programmes to compensate for the lack of skilled workers.
Much has been said about the explosive growth of the Brazilian economy, but without proper investment in the education of its 191 million population, that growth could stall. "Brazil has many hurdles to overcome," said Viviane Senna, the sister of the late Brazilian motor-racing hero and the head of the Instituto Ayrton Senna, an educational NGO that works with the private sector in order to provide better education for over 2 million state-school children across Brazil.
"Infrastructure, political reform, pension reform, the reform of workers laws – to develop we need all of these reforms, but all of this alone is not enough. We need to have heavy investment in education and management. Only money is not enough. You can't have all of this without a trained workforce."
In a recent report on the country, Goldman Sachs identified improvements in education as crucial for Brazil. "Labour productivity has lagged markedly, largely owing to the deficiencies in the quality of education. If we proxy education by the average number of years of secondary education, Brazil ranks below China and Russia."
An estimated 60 million people in Brazil are in formal education, from pre-school to university. There has been an increasing clamour from politicians and others to improve standards. The president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised to "revolutionise education", partly with profits from the oil fields and there has been progress – almost all children now attend basic schools, which teach to the age of 14, although one-quarter will drop out and attendance beyond 15 is only around 70%. The government spends around 12% of government expenditure on education and 4.2% as a percentage of GDP.
There remain huge problems with quality. A recent study by the Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada found that the average 25-year-old had completed only nine years of education. Studies show that 10% of the population remains illiterate. Nearly one-in-five students are in the wrong grade for their age because they have had to repeat a year. "Whether you are talking about education, healthcare or public security you have almost universal access but no quality," said Senna. "There is no point in having nearly everyone in school when most of them are failing because of the poor quality of the schools. This is the challenge for the Brazilian education system," she said, "making people for first-world Brazil rather than third-world Brazil."
As a result there is growing demand from a burgeoning middle class for better quality education, which is largely being met by the private sector. The US Commercial Service, which works with American institutions looking for inroads to the market, reckons that 35 million Brazilians on low incomes have become middle class in the past three years. Around 19% of secondary pupils attend private schools, but the number is more marked in higher education. According to the Ministry of Education, 89% of the 2,200 undergraduate and graduate institutions are run by private organisations, many of which charge between £6,000 and £12,000 a year.
"Brazil is a vast country with a young population, but the public sector isn't keeping pace with demand and that gap will continue to grow," said Geoff Smith, director of the São Paulo office of the British Council. "As the economy changes and there are more people with disposable income so the attitude toward education changes." He said that at the top end, the universities in Brazil can stand shoulder to shoulder with those in Europe and the United States. The number of Brazilians entering higher education has expanded rapidly. Higher education enrolments were 1.7 million in 1994, rising to around 5 million 2008, representing about 20% of the people in Brazil aged 18-24. But the proportion is still well below the likes of Chile and Argentina, and the government has set a target of increasing that to 30%. Distance learning is also growing in the high double digits each year. Smith said online learning, in a country as vast as Brazil, offers a potentially lucrative market for foreign investors.
Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times and Penguin Books, is also one of the world's largest educational businesses. It has a presence in Brazil focusing on English-language learning and higher education. The company said it also sees opportunities for involvement in the primary education sector. In Brazil, Pearson custom publishes books and other learning materials for universities in a wide range of subjects, as well as supplying tutorial software programs. Pearson's eCollege company last year won contracts from several institutions in Brazil. "It is a huge country and a huge education market," said a Pearson spokesman. "There is room for improvement. Brazil's educational standards don't match its wealth and relevance on the world stage."
There is also an increasing amount of foreign direct investment, with mainly US institutions acquiring Brazilian universities. As the economy joins the global marketplace and companies such as Embraer and Vale compete on the world stage, so demand for learning English has also grown rapidly, something expected to accelerate as Brazil prepares to welcome the world for the 2016 Olympic Games. Around 20,000 Brazilians are studying English in the UK at any one time.
The Odebrecht Foundation, founded in 1965, is a private, non-profit organisation aimed at promoting the importance of education, with the aim of fighting poverty and social inequality, focusing mainly on the rural areas of the north-east. Its president, Maurício Medeiros, underlines the enormity of the job still to be done. In the region in Bahia where the foundation works, he said between 70% and 80% of families suffer social exclusion. He added that when the foundation arrived in the area, "40% or 45% of the population didn't even have any kind of basic civil documents. You can imagine how these people react, you bring a little bit of civility to people, raise their morale and dignity by giving them work." He said that abandoned children are commonplace in the big cities, but that the foundation works at the root of the problem, by putting young people into education in rural areas.
João Dória Jr, who runs the business association Lide, works with Grupo de Líderes Empresariais – which promotes projects for the improvement of education across the country – also emphasises how crucial this area of the economy will be if Brazil is to continue to develop. "Education is the biggest need in Brazil and the biggest opportunity," he said. "If we speed up education programmes, Brazil will become a more solid nation and well prepared for a new stage, less reliant on welfare. It is still very dependent on assistance programmes, and a country is only an effective nation when it assures job opportunities and a job is only assured through education."
