A/HRC/35/24/Add.1 capacity, political will and professional skills, the municipal system of education in Chile led to great disparities in quality among public schools. According to the Ministry of Education, there are plans to introduce a performance agreement based on a new deal with municipalities on education under which each municipality will undertake to implement a series of initiatives agreed in 2015. 36. Such disparities show the importance of the bill on the national public education system, which seeks to create a national education system of uniform quality, with the overall responsibility of the national Government being to provide better management while decentralized implementation powers are retained at the municipal level. 10 37. The 2015 Inclusive Education Act is another landmark piece of legislation in that it is aimed at doing away with disparities in access to education. It establishes the State’s duty to guarantee the conditions necessary to ensure that everyone enjoys the right to inclusive quality education. It provides that admission processes must be transparent and prohibits schools from requesting the information that was used in the past to exclude students on the grounds of socioeconomic background, educational level, marital status and the financial position of the student’s family. 38. The Act does away with the shared funding system and prohibits schools that receive State subsidies from profiting from the subsidies. The shared funding system was introduced under Act No. 19.247 of 15 September 1993 on donations with educational purposes, allowing both subsidized private schools at the primary and secondary levels and municipal public schools at the secondary level to charge enrolment fees to a maximum level while continuing to receive subsidies. Years later, subsidized private schools were allowed to charge additional monthly fees on top of the shared funding payments. The implementation of the Inclusive Education Act will give all families the freedom to choose any educational establishment irrespective of their economic situation or ability to pay, and access to education free of charge. C. Developments in higher education 39. Higher education comprises three types of establishment in Chile: (a) Universities providing professional and technical higher education, which can issue academic degrees; (b) Professional institutes providing both professional and technical education, which cannot issue academic degrees; (c) Technical education centres providing technical higher education. Professional institutes and technical education centres primarily serve students from the first three lowest-income quintiles. 40. While enrolment in higher education has significantly increased in recent years, covering some 40 per cent of the population aged between 18- and 24-years-old by 2014,11 access is still largely determined by family income. About 80 per cent of students are enrolled in private universities and currently, higher education in Chile is mostly private and very expensive. 41. In order to obtain a place at university, candidates have to take the university admission examination, which is conducted by the Department of Evaluation, Measurement 10 11 8 Article 5 of the bill provides for the establishment of the Public Education Directorate, a centralized public service reporting to the Ministry of Education. Article 10 provides for the establishment of Local Public Education Services as functionally and territorially decentralized public services in 15 different regions. The text of the bill is available at www.mineduc.cl/wpcontent/uploads/sites/19/2015/12/Mensaje-1174-363-Proyecto-de-Ley-que-Crea-el-Sistema-deEducacion-Publica-firmado.pdf. National Human Rights Institute, “Complementary report: International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”, March 2014, p. 52. Available at http://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/ CESCR/Shared%20Documents/CHL/INT_CESCR_IFL_CHL_18457_E.pdf.