Minister Özer sent a video message to the Education Ministers of G20 Countries summit organized under the term presidency of Indonesia.

 

Özer began his speech by thanking the G20 Indonesia Presidency for including "education" to the G20 agenda and congratulated the Education Working Group for their successful efforts.

 

Noting that Covid-19 pandemic which has been affecting the entire world since 2020 has no similar example in the history, Özer said, "This pandemic which claimed the lives of millions of people also caused a global crisis in health, economy and education. The entire world bitterly experienced that distance education cannot be the alternative face-to-face education and it can only be used as a support mechanism. We all saw that schools are very important for the social, psychological and emotional skill development of children."

 

Özer stressed that deep inequality in education is a danger for the entire world adding that, "However, we know for sure that education has a unique force in preventing inequalities."

 

Giving information about the education system of Türkiye, Özer stated, "Türkiye has a large education system with more than 1 million and 200 thousand teachers and approximately 19 million students. Our goal is to provide equal education opportunities to each student and equip them with skills so that they can compete with their peers in the world and prepare them for the future."

 

Özer mentioned the transformation that Türkiye achieved in the last 20 years adding that, "our country showed important progress especially in the last 20 years. There has been a significant increase in the schooling rates in all levels of education. Moreover, we achieved quality based growth in education. Our country's performance in PISA and TIMSS verifies this. Türkiye improves its performance most despite the fact that it also increases the number of students most in the 15 year old age group.

 

Noting that the Ministry of National Education has defined three prior topics namely increasing equal opportunity in education, improving vocational education and professional development programs for teachers, Özer went on to say that: "First of all, no matter what the conditions are, we are working in an effort to give quality of education to all of our students. We provide support programs for socioeconomically disadvantaged students and students who have special needs and children who are in our country as a result of forced migration. We give special importance to preschool education in order to reinforce equal opportunity in education. Within this framework, we decided to open 3,000 new kindergartens and 40,000 new preschool classrooms in 2022 in order to reach the OECD average in preschool schooling rates and we increased the schooling rate of five year old children from 78 percent to 93 percent within a short period of time.

 

Minister Özer stressed that his Ministry believed that vocational education is strategically important for the future of the world and Türkiye said, "We increase cooperation with related sectors while we reinforce the education-production- employment cycle. Finally, we focus on the professional development of our teachers. We updated our on the job training program approach, increased the number of teachers who attended the training programs and turned our schools into education centers for teachers."

 

Minister Özer added that they believed that international cooperation and solidarity in education is the most valuable instrument for building a more prosperous world."