The meeting of the Government of Georgia was held on March 2, 2010 . The Agenda covered 63 items.
Before starting the meeting, Prime Minister of Georgia Mr. Nika Gilauri talked about the educational system.
See below Prime Minister's opening speech:
"One of the main issues of this governmental meeting is an educational system and reforms to be implemented in it... Many things have already been done in that area: national unified exams - one of the most successful reforms recently implemented by us. However, I know that in the Ministry of Education, they studied those bottlenecks which are still evident in the system. (The Ministry) is developing a specific policy to find ways of overcoming such bottlenecks.
I would like to present to our society all those directions and innovations we have already agreed to implement in the nearest future...
Unavailability of a national unified curriculum turned out to be one of the main bottlenecks. There is a certain problem at schools, when children pass to the 6th grade from the 5th one. Frequently, there is no logical link between those two grades, as school-books and programs are changed. I know that now the Ministry of Education is working hard on it. From September 1 of this year, we will have a new national curriculum, which will set minimum criteria. Schools must be free in choosing the ways of teaching but.... From September 1, we will have all necessary criteria in place for establishing specific curriculums for every grade.
The second bottleneck identified by us is a problem related to salary payments. There is a disproportion in that area - in some schools, average teacher salary is over 200 GEL while school director's salary is being lowered. As I know, there are more than 1000 schools with directors' minimum salary of 130-140 GEL. According to our decision, director's minimum salary will be 300 GEL at any school...
Next innovation in the educational field is a safe school concept. The Ministry of Education is specifically working on that question. From April, we will start experiment: in the secondary school #10, Tbilisi, a mandatary service will be established to ensure the implementation of safe school concept....
Furthermore, I would like to introduce one more innovation, which will be implemented by us in the nearest future - in April-May - in the educational field. It is a special school card: today, any pupil needs cash to buy food at a school buffet. The school cards will be used for payment and children will not need any cash for that. Besides, those cads will be linked to the SMS system and parents will receive messages about children's entering and leaving from the school. It will add comfort to parents as they will know the location of their children at any time. We will do our best to implement that system in the nearest future".
Press Service of the Prime Minister