2024-07-04 00:14:25
At the same time, she refrained from assessing whether the ministry’s work can be assessed as insufficient, as the State Audit Office pointed out.
“We cannot pull out a peach pit every day and see if the roots have already sprouted. Each process takes a certain amount of time to bring results. (..) We see that the beds are right, the seed is right. Now we just have to let it sprout ,” believes Chaksha.
The politician is sure that the auditors’ report will help in negotiations on next year’s budget, as it highlights the role of education in the development of Latvia’s economy.
“I hope that this State Audit report will be a support for obtaining funding for the implementation of the new financing concept “Program in the school”, because it includes all these things that will ensure justice and quality,” said Chaksha.
The management of MES welcomes the fact that the report also shows the division of responsibilities. Edīte Kanaviņa, director of the Education Department of the Ministry of Education and Culture, believes that an understanding of a common goal has been reached in the negotiations with local governments. Although the school network criteria proposed by the Ministry of Education and Culture have not yet been established in the regulatory framework, local governments are already applying them in practice, organizing the school network and planning enrollment in the new school year.
At the same time, the views of the State Audit Office and the Ministry of Education and Culture differ on the distribution of teachers’ workloads. The State Audit Office recommends looking at the distribution of pedagogues’ workloads by class group. In the meantime, the Ministry of Education and Culture is convinced that it is necessary to look at the entire group of pedagogues as a whole and to ensure the “43:57” workload composition, i.e. 43% of contact hours and 57% of other pedagogical duties. This composition is determined using the methodology established by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Kanaviņa noted that, normatively, this goal has already been achieved, and now we need to make it work in real life. The load distribution proposed by the Ministry of Interior is said to be optimal, also compared to other European Union countries.
In accordance with the new financing model, the school management will be able to determine a different load distribution, but they will have to follow certain principles of the load composition, Čakša added to Kanaviņa’s statement.
In the report, the State Audit Office also expressed criticism regarding the preparation of teachers and improvement of professional competence. In the assessment of the auditors, the planning of state budget study places implemented by the Ministry of Education and Culture is not based on high-quality and complete data on demand, but is basically based on the number of students who applied and were admitted to pedagogy education programs in previous years.
Ilze Saleniece, Acting State Secretary of the Ministry of Education and Culture, said that in cooperation with Riga Technical University, a tool for forecasting the demand and supply of pedagogues was developed, which takes into account the existing vacancies of pedagogues, the number of students and the changes initiated in the education policy. Currently, the tool is being tested when planning the number of state budget study places for the next year.
On the other hand, the Ministry of Education and Culture hopes to increase the number of graduates in the field of pedagogy by switching to an institutional financing model. This will allow to “determine very concretely” that the Ministry of Education and Culture expects a certain number of graduates and results in relation to the employment of these graduates.
In the coming years, the Ministry of Education and Culture has also committed to improving the system of professional development by establishing a professional support center to support educators in implementing and strengthening existing changes. Currently, the Ministry of Education and Culture has prioritized the transition to improved teaching content and the implementation of inclusive education, including the transition to teaching only in Latvian. The methodological center will also develop methodological support materials for teachers in general education until the end of 2026.
Saleniece admitted that the prescribed 36 hours, which a teacher must devote to professional development in three years, is not enough. In the 2022/2023 academic year, 18,000 pedagogues participated in professional development courses. On the other hand, the state provides 1.2 million euros per year for professional development measures in addition to funding from European Union funds.
In addition to the professional competence development needs set by the state, the director of the educational institution, in cooperation with each teacher, must evaluate what his learning needs are and how to solve them, the ministry’s management said.
The LETA agency has already reported that the Ministry of Education and Culture must invest much more effort to ensure the attraction of new teachers and their retention in the profession, the State Audit concluded in the audit.
In the view of the VC, the actions taken by the Ministry of Education and Culture have not been effective enough to ensure the training of pedagogues necessary for the sector and, together with the founders and managers of educational institutions, to promote their persistence in the profession, as a third of young pedagogues leave the education sector already within the first five years. On the other hand, the reasons why the interviewed teachers in 2023/2024. during the school year, they wanted to end their employment relationship due to many different things – continuous changes in the education system, lack of teaching materials, dissatisfaction with the salary, uncertainty about the future in connection with the planned reforms.
In the assessment of the auditors, the reorganization of the school network in some municipalities of the audit sample was carried out only “on paper”, but the financing model “Pupil in the municipality” does not provide a clear, transparent calculation of funding and is not based on the evaluation of the work of pedagogues.
2024-07-04 00:14:25