A/HRC/4/9/Add.2 page 15 enforce its national education integration policy. Furthermore, there is no effective independent monitoring and evaluation system within Hungary and schools are under no obligation to accept or invite independent inspectors even if recommended by the national Government. Segregation in education 61. One Roma woman commented that: “Roma children are being robbed of their future by segregation in education.” The vast majority of children attend primary schools that are segregated with respect to Roma and non-Roma students. Eliminating segregated schooling at the primary level has become the priority objective for creating access to quality education for Roma. This important imperative adopted by the national Government has been the focus of resistance by many parents and local “majority” governments. 62. Resistance has taken a number of forms including: “white flight” to communities without Roma populations within the school districts, labelling Roma children as mentally disabled and diverting them to separate schools or separate tracks within majority schools, designating Roma as “private students” who need not attend classes, and even co-opting the Roma minority self-government structure in order to neutralize its ability to block local efforts to evade desegregation initiatives of the national Government. 63. The system of “free choice” established by the Constitution has been used as a mechanism for segregation in the school system. Parents can decide not to send their children to certain schools, and schools in other districts were free to make decisions as to which students to accept from outside their catchment area. Amendments to the Education Act in 2005 offer useful potential to assist in combating “free choice” as a vehicle for school segregation, since schools will be required to accept “disadvantaged students” first and to guarantee that a certain balance is maintained in the student body. This would avoid the “tipping point” phenomenon whereby increases over a certain percentage of Roma students would drive the best teachers to abandon the school and non-Roma parents to withdraw their children. 64. Another vehicle to achieve segregation is that Roma children are disproportionately placed in separate schools or classes for the mentally or learning disabled, regardless of their actual intellectual abilities. The Commissioner for the Integration of Disadvantaged and Roma Children of the Ministry of Education has stated that while 2 per cent of non-Roma children are in special needs schools for children classified as “slightly mentally disabled”, this figure is 20 per cent amongst Roma children. Children are tested prior to entrance to the primary school system, at which stage Roma children are more likely to be filtered into such special schools. While attendance of kindergarten is important to early educational progress, estimates suggest that a high percentage of Roma, usually those living in smaller or isolated settlements, lack kindergarten places. Moreover 10-11 per cent of Roma children never attend kindergarten although, according to the Act on Public Education, one year is compulsory for every child before they start school. On a positive note, new policies have been conceived to make it harder to fail children in the first three years of schooling, assisting disadvantaged children to catch up. 65. Financial motivations at the municipal level may work to perpetuate segregation and Roma exclusion from mainstream education. The State gives to municipalities higher grants on a per capita basis for children labelled slightly mentally disabled. However, without effective independent monitoring, there is often no evidence that extra funds are spent on the special needs