Minister of National Education Mahmut Özer reminded that 128 advisory decisions were made during the National Education Council which focused on "Equal Opportunity in Basic Education", "Improvement of Vocational Education" and "Professional Development of Teachers" and a great majority of these votes were accepted unanimously.

 

First monitoring report concerning the council was published in March and the number of actions taken by the Ministry in relation with the advisory decisions was 57 on this date. It reached 62 in June and has reached 81 till now. Minister Özer stated that there has been a close relation between the policies of the Ministry implemented in the last year and the advisory decisions of the Council.

 

Reminding that many of these decisions such as the Teacher Profession Law, sending renewal budgets directly to schools, increasing the schooling rate of five year old children and distribution of free text books in addition to free supplementary sources were implemented by the Ministry, Özer made following comments, "We are taking steps by considering the best interests of students. We have implemented 81 of the advisory decisions within a year. Moreover, we have taken different steps concerning 13 other decisions of the National Education Council including free lunch or nutrition support to students. You all know that our Ministry has been providing free meal service to students living in dorms and those who benefit from transported education since the 1980s but we have gradually expanded this service in the last 20 years. Number of students benefiting from free meal service will be increased from 1.8 million to 5 million at the beginning of the second term of the school year. This will be an important step in increasing equal opportunity in education. Moreover, we have been working in an effort to establish an Early Warning System in the last 6 months which is based on official data concerning dropout and absentee figures. This system aims at decreasing the number of dropout students."

 

Özer went on to say that, "We will follow the decisions of the Council. We are taking steps about 13 different decisions such as the development of monitoring  and support system for including disadvantaged student to the education system in cooperation with the local public offices and agencies and related NGOs, enrichment of theoretical and applied vocational training programs for people who need special education,  encouragement of vocational education institutions to national and international activities in order to support their national and international competition force, adaption of education institutions to the international principles in order to maintain accessibility to education, improvement of school environments as a part of 1,000 schools in vocational education and 10,000 schools in basic education projects."

 

Özer reminded that a decision concerning fixing the rate increase of school cafeterias at 25 percent was published in the Official Gazette yesterday and this will allow students and teachers to purchase food and beverages with reasonable prices.