site.btaEducation Ministry to Unveil Measures for Improving School Discipline This Week

“We will probably present our proposals to improve discipline in schools this week, and they fall into three groups,” Minister of Education and Science Georgi Valchev said in an interview on Bulgarian National Television’s morning programme here on Monday.

“One group concerns disciplinary measures. Before the ultimate measure of expulsion is reached, there should be a series of lighter disciplinary measures so that teachers can warn pupils through these measures,” the Minister said.

He explained that the second group of measures would focus on identifying pupils’ abilities and strengths. The aim is to help families and other teachers understand how a child can be encouraged and supported. There will also be purely organisational measures to make clear who is responsible for discipline at a particular school, Minister Valchev said. 

According to him, focusing solely on whether or not there should be a grade for discipline would not solve the problem. The issue will be put up for discussion, but this will not take years. “We will take into account everything positive and reasonable and we need to introduce it, because there is no way anyone can deny that discipline in Bulgarian schools is not good,” the Education Minister said.

“We have given ourselves a year so that we can carefully change the ‘money follows the pupil’ model, which has completely exhausted its underlying philosophy,” Georgi Valchev said once again. He noted that this was why so many adjustments had been made to the basic formula over the years, but despite this, the model still condemns small schools to survival rather than development and does not give children a chance to receive a good education. “Within the next year, we will propose a new school funding model,” the Minister said.

Regarding the performance of Bulgarian pupils in the international PISA assessment, Valchev said that curricula must be changed and new content and textbooks introduced. “We need to reverse the trend of textbooks being written in language that pupils cannot understand,” he said.

Minister Georgi Valchev said that meetings would be held at the Ministry of Finance concerning teachers’ salaries. He also said that a working group had been established to prepare draft amendments to higher education legislation.