Age at which pupils or students would enter a given programme or level of education assuming they had started at the official entrance age for the lowest level, studied full-time throughout and progressed through the system without repeating or skipping a grade. The theoretical entrance age to a given programme or level may be very different from the actual or even the most common entrance age.
A necessary pre-condition for reaching UPE is to have all children of school admission age entering school. While policies adopted since Dakar have brought about major progress in access to schooling, school systems have not always been able to retain the large flow of new entrants, making achievement of universal primary enrolment and completion difficult.