Almost a third of Indonesia's state primary school buildings need repairs and some are so decrepit they threaten children's safety, a senior education ministry official said.

"I estimate that about 30 percent of our primary schools are suffering from various degrees of damage and decay," said Indra Jati Sidi, director general for elementary education.

"But most of these facilities can still be used, although the safety of the pupils is at stake," he told AFP. "We are currently working on gradually repairing them through our annual state budget allocations." Sidi, quoted by the Jakarta Post, said some buildings were falling apart due to old age. Others had been damaged because they were in conflict zones like Aceh, Sulawesi and Maluku.

"If the nation is committed to improving the quality of education in general in the future, we need to do something," the Post quoted him as saying.

The United Nations Children's Fund said in a December report that millions of Indonesian children were missing out on schooling, in a blow to efforts to fight poverty and disease.

It said education's share of government spending had dropped substantially over the past decade, from about nine percent to less than seven percent, and was now the lowest in East Asia and the Pacific.