Education Ministry Plans to Discuss Rules for Optimising School Network

Bratislava, 2 January (TASR) - The Education Ministry plans to discuss the setting of rules for optimising the school network in cooperation with local authorities, primary school associations and private, church and ethnic-minority schools, Education Minister Tomas Drucker (Voice-SD) has said in a year-end interview with TASR, adding that the aim is to provide quality while also maintaining accessibility. "We know that it wouldn't work if there was a university in every single municipality. It's the same with hospitals and other public services," said Drucker, adding that for primary schools, the principle is that they should be as close as possible to where children live. "That's reasonable, but the problem is that we have hundreds of very small primary schools in Slovakia in which there are classes with only four or five children," added Drucker. Testing in mathematics among 15-year-olds has revealed that children from small schools performed 33 percent worse than schools with more than 250 pupils, he said, citing a lack of teachers in smaller schools and insufficient exchanges of experience and competition as some of the reasons. The first optimisation efforts have already been implemented in secondary-school education. "The aim isn't to close schools, but to merge them into more robust and solid units, so that they'll become part of larger schools," said Drucker. Excessive fragmentation of study fields is another problem at secondary schools, while there is a lack of leavers in technical fields and other promising areas that are in demand on the labour market, added Drucker. jrg/df