The Ministry of National Education, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Konya Governor's Office, Konya Municipality and Selçuk University organized "Agriculture from Education to Production" workshop in Konya with the purpose of educating the quality of human resources for agriculture and food sector.

 

In addition to Minister of National Education Mahmut Özer, 450 people including ministry bureaucrats, provincial directors of national education, school principals, field teachers and NGO representatives were present at the opening ceremony of the workshop.

 

Minister Özer said during his speech at the ceremony that agriculture vocational high schools in the country are jointly managed with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

 

"Within the framework of our cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, we will educate human resources needed in agriculture. Secondly, agriculture vocational high school has approximately 4 million square meter practice fields. We will plan the production of agricultural products in coordination with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and sell these products at the sales offices which will be founded in front of the school to people with low prices. It is very important. There have been many speculations about bread prices. Actually, we had a meeting with Deputy Minister Sadri Şensoy and Director General of Vocational Education Nazan Şener about 4- 5 months ago about bread production in vocational high schools. We decided to found a bread factory in 15 schools. Right now, our daily bread production capacity reached 252,000 loaves of bread.  Last week, we signed a protocol with the Gaziantep Metropolitan Mayor concerning the daily production of 50,000 loaves of bread. Loaf of bread will be sold for around 2 liras to people at sales points of the municipality," said Minister Özer.

 

Özer also announced that they have decided to found bread factories in vocational high schools in 100 different spots in all 81 cities of the country. The daily production capacities of the vocational high school bread factories will be 1 million loaves of bread and these will be sold to people with low prices.

 

 

Özer stressed that they will build a vocational education system that will rapidly produce required products with reasonable prices by reinforcing the education, production and employment cycle and also raise the quality of human resources for the private sector.

 

Minister Özer noted that Türkiye achieved two crucial changes in vocational education and they made a rational definition of demand and supply.

 

"Share of the private sector in vocational education in Europe is 50 percent. This figure was below 1 percent in our country until 2021 and currently it is around 10 percent," said Özer.

 

Minister Özer mentioned previous problems concerning vocational education and reminded that success expectations from vocational high school graduates were low.

 

Noting that recent food and energy crisis and turbulences experienced in the supply chain in the entire world caused the country to pay a social cost, Minister Özer said, "Be sure that we will overcome this period in solidary under the leadership of our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan like we did in the last 19 years."

 

Minister Özer reminded that conservative families were blamed for not sending their girls to schools in 2000s but yet previous governments failed to build schools and the number of classrooms which was around 300,000 in 2000s is increased to 850,000 classrooms. He noted that for the first time in the history of the Republic, the number of female students exceeded the number of male students.

 

Mentioning recent success projects carried out in order to decrease opportunity differences among schools and increase the quality of vocational education, Özer said that academically successful students started to prefer to enroll in vocational high schools.

 

Minister Özer reminded that vocational high schools produced most needed products varying from masks to disinfectants, from face guards to video laryngoscope device and mask machines during the pandemic adding that, "Vocational high schools are now exporting their products to other countries. Last week, we exported paper towels from a vocational high school located in İstanbul. This school also produces paper towel machines. We have decided to rapidly produce this machine and send them to all 81 cities of the country. Vocational high schools will produce all paper towels needed for all schools in the 2022-2023 school year."