The past years saw a decline in the number of schools and students in Moldova, the National Bureau of Statistics said, quoted by Info-Prim Neo. The number of schools fell by 46 units from 2003 until present. A number of 1,536 schools work at present. Three fourths of the total number of schools are located in rural areas. The number of certain types of general secondary education institutions has decreased during the past few years or they have been transformed into sections of larger primary or secondary schools or of schools that have several education levels. The share of high schools rose from 12% in 2000-2001 to 31% in 2007-2008, while the share of general secondary schools fell by 18 percentage points. As many as 461,000 students studied in primary and secondary education establishments at the start of the 2007-2008 school year, a 6.2% decrease compared with the previous school year and a 26.7% decrease compared with 2000-2001. The largest part of students in primary and secondary education studied in rural areas (59.5%). Some 33.4% of the total number of students studied in primary schools, 52% in secondary schools and 14.6% in lyceums. The number of fist graders and pupils of preparatory classes decreased by 3.2% compared with the previous school year and by 35.1% compared with 2000-2001. At the same time, the number of last-year school students fell by 5.8% compared with the previous year and by 11.2% on 2003-2004. Some 79.6% of the students study in Romanian, 20.2% in Russian and 0.2% in other languages. Among other teaching languages in primary and secondary education are Ukrainian, Bulgarian and English. The French language is studied by 51.1% of the students in primary education, while English is studied by 73.0% of the high school students. German is studied by 2.7% of the students in primary schools, 3.4% of the students in secondary schools and 5.1% of the students in lyceums. Most of the day secondary schools and lyceums (98.6%) are public. There are 22 private education establishments, including 21 lyceums and 1 secondary school, which are located in towns only.