'My Daughter Shares a Desk With 42 Other Children': Istanbul Families Speak Out on Crumbling School Crisis

The back-to-school season is still two months away, but Fatma Koçak is already dreading September. Her 10-year-old attends Atatürk İlkokulu in Bağcılar, a district on Istanbul's European side where the school population has swelled by roughly a third over the past five years, driven partly by arrivals from Syria and partly by families priced out of central neighbourhoods by inflation. Last year her daughter's classroom held 43 pupils. The school has no separate science lab. When it rains hard, a patch of ceiling in the third-floor corridor leaks.

Stories like Koçak's are multiplying across Istanbul this summer as parents, teachers and local administrators confront a convergence of pressures: an unresolved backlog of earthquake-risk school buildings flagged after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş disaster, a Turkish lira that has lost more than 60 percent of its value against the dollar since 2022, and a wave of new enrolments that the city's infrastructure was never designed to absorb. The timing matters because the Ministry of National Education is due to publish its 2026–2027 school calendar and facility upgrade schedule before the end of July, and community groups want their concerns on the record before the bureaucracy moves on.

Buildings That Scare Teachers More Than Students

In Zeytinburnu, a neighbourhood wedged between the old city walls and the Sea of Marmara, the local branch of the Eğitim-Sen teachers' union has been circulating a petition since May demanding seismic assessments for seven primary and secondary schools built before 1980. Two of those schools sit within 400 metres of the Marmara coastline on soil classified as high liquefaction risk. A structural engineer who reviewed documents for one Zeytinburnu school, on condition of anonymity, told The Daily Istanbul that the building would require at minimum 14 million lira — roughly $390,000 at current exchange rates — in reinforcement work just to meet the 2023 revised earthquake code. The İstanbul Valiliği, the city's provincial governorate, has not publicly responded to the petition.

Across the Bosphorus in Kadıköy, parents at Mühürdar Caddesi's Özel Kadıköy Lisesi — a mid-range private school charging 280,000 lira per year in tuition — say they feel the squeeze differently. Inflation has eroded the purchasing power of middle-income families who stretched to keep children out of overcrowded state schools, and the school raised fees 45 percent in January 2026. Three families The Daily Istanbul spoke to in Moda Park said they were moving their children back into the public system this autumn. "The private school option used to be a safety valve," said one father, a small business owner who declined to give his name. "Now that valve is closed."

The Numbers Behind the Noise

Turkey's Ministry of National Education reported in its 2025 statistical yearbook that Istanbul hosts 2.1 million students across 4,847 state schools, with an average class size of 34.7 — the highest of any province. The OECD average is 21. In districts with high Syrian refugee populations, including Esenyurt and Sultangazi, İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi data shows that some schools are running double shifts to accommodate demand, meaning certain classes begin at 7 a.m. and others run until 6 p.m. The CHP-led metropolitan municipality, under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, announced in April a 500-million-lira fund to build 12 new school buildings, but critics note that construction cannot realistically start before the 2027–2028 academic year even if tenders go smoothly.

The Eğitim Reformu Girişimi, a Istanbul-based education NGO headquartered in Şişli, published a report in June estimating that 340 state school buildings in the city require urgent structural work and that the backlog will cost approximately 4.7 billion lira to address — eight times the municipality's current allocation. The group is calling on both the metropolitan municipality and the Ministry of National Education in Ankara to sign a formal joint protocol by October, something that has proved politically complicated given the ongoing tension between the CHP-run city hall and the AKP national government.

For Koçak in Bağcılar, the protocol talk feels distant. She says she plans to attend the August 15 meeting of her school's parent-teacher board and push for a written commitment on classroom size before the academic year begins. Several other parents from her building have said they will join her. Whether the officials show up is, at this point, the question.