And why the answer is more complicated than it seems.
What this is about
This piece reflects on the observations and work carried out under the initiative "Equal Chance: Access to Secondary Education – Policies and Practices," implemented by the Trust for Social Achievement (TSA) together with local partners Arete Youth Foundation, Amalipe Center for Interethnic Dialogue and Tolerance, Association Integro, the Roma Academy for Culture and Education – Sliven, and the New Path Association – Hayredin.
Over the past 12 years, the program has supported more than 1,700 high school students from Bulgarian, Turkish, Roma, and other minority backgrounds with scholarships covering transportation, textbooks, rent, and other educational needs. In its current phase, the initiative also includes a large-scale field study across 15 regions of Bulgaria, led by Professor Maya Grekova. The study examines the hidden financial and logistical barriers to secondary education, as well as the broader range of challenges students and their families face on the way to — and through — high school. Local partners play a central role in gathering information across the different regions. The study is carried out in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Science, regional education authorities, schools, municipal administrations, and other relevant institutions and stakeholders.
Two reports have been published to date — the first covering the regions of Veliko Tarnovo, Vratsa, Kyustendil, Razgrad, and Sliven (2023–2024), and the second covering Gabrovo, Montana, Plovdiv, Shumen, and Yambol (2024–2025). In the final phase of the study, data collection and analysis are currently underway for the regions of Pleven, Targovishte, Haskovo, Stara Zagora, and Pazardzhik, with a final report to follow.
The meeting behind the numbers
Earlier this year, we presented the second report at the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) press clubs across the five regions it covers — a series of public events where, together with our local partners, we talked about what seemed like practical matters: school transportation, textbooks, school meals. But the conversation kept circling back to a bigger question: what does it actually mean for education to be accessible and affordable for students and their families?
Shortly after, we brought together the partner organizations and Professor Grekova for a working meeting — officially to discuss progress on the fieldwork. In practice, it turned into something more: a chance to sit with everything that had accumulated across regions, across stories, across the things said out loud and the things that had long gone unnamed.
Two years of work across ten regions gives you more than data. It gives you a sense of a recurring story. And that story has slowly been finding its language.
Transportation, meals, textbooks — not peripheral, but foundational
The more regions we cover, the harder it becomes to talk about "access" as something uniform. Inequality doesn't sort neatly by region — sometimes it shifts from one municipality to the next, from one school to another, sometimes within the same town.
In one place, transportation is covered, but only within a predetermined geography of options. In another, there's a dormitory — but one that isn't a realistic choice for every family. In one school, providing meals is understood as a condition for students to get through the day at all. In another, it's treated as a secondary convenience.
Transportation, school meals, and learning materials aren't peripheral to the conversation about access. They are, very often, the threshold of what's possible — shaping not just whether a student can get to school, but which school they can realistically afford to choose.
The choice that isn't really a choice
Behind the logistics lies a deeper question: how does a young person experience education? As a place where they have the right to explore, to have direction, to choose — or as a system of compromises: what's nearest, what's cheapest, where will they take me?
When a student enters high school not with a sense that possibilities are open to them, but with a sense that they simply need to fit in somewhere — we're no longer talking only about limited access. We're talking about a limited imagination for one's own future, one that the system itself quietly reinforces.
A foundation, not a finish line
Three years and fifteen regions aren't a conclusion — they're a foundation. There is now a language for this problem, there is data, there are regional portraits, and there are more and more people who recognize that accessible education cannot end at the school entrance.
If a student has no way to get to the classroom, nothing to eat, or if their choice of high school after 7th grade is driven entirely by cost — then education may be formally available, but it is not genuinely accessible. That's why we believe this kind of work deserves a next step: one that doesn't treat access to education in isolation, but places it in the wider context of demographics, the labor market, and the kind of communities people want to stay in.
