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Czech practical primary schools to be transformed, not closed

04 February 2013
4 minute read

Deputy Education Minister Jiří Nantl says "practical primary schools" in the Czech Republic will not be closed as many fear, but that it is necessary to transform them as per a European Court of Human Rights judgment so that pupils are not enrolled into such schools simply because they come from socially disadvantaged environments. Czech Government Human Rights Commissioner Monika Šimůnková told a public hearing in the Czech Senate today that the schools must be transformed.

The subject of the hearing was a petition to preserve the "practical primary schools" that is protesting the government’s "Strategy for the Fight against Social Exclusion" and has been signed by more than 76 300 people. According to those who created the petition, the Strategy is countings on closing the practical primary schools by 2015 and was adopted without taking pupils’ needs into account.

"The closure of the ‘practical primary schools’ will not resolve the problem of low educational attainment by Romani children from socially excluded localities. Such a step will simply irreversibly harm the education of all the other children," declared the petition’s initiator, Jana Smetanová, who is the director of the Prodloužená Primary School in Pardubice. Smetanová believes it is also not a solution to transfer the transformed schools to municipal management and let the ministries find the billions needed to implement the Strategy from their own resources.

Czech Senator Marcel Chládek (Czech Social Democratic Party – ČSSD), the chair of the Senate Education Committee, blamed the Czech Government Human Rights Commissioner for not making the Strategy sufficiently clear, saying it had been designed without consulting experts who have practical experience in these matters and without ensuring there would be financing for its implementation. Chládek told journalists that he wants his committee to design a "national roundtable" to discuss the Strategy and separate the debate about it from debate on the measures to be taken because of the European Court of Human Rights judgment. "We will invite representatives of the Office of the Government and the Education Ministry to the roundtable," he said, adding that the topic has been undervalued to date and that former Czech Education Minister Josef Dobeš, who headed the ministry when the Strategy was created, reportedly never even read its entire text.

"All participants – both representatives of the Government and the Education Ministry as well as the petitioners – agreed that at this moment the closure of the ‘practical primary schools’ would really be a catastrophe. The role of those schools is irreplaceable," Chládek said of the Senate hearing. The senator is also the Shadow Education Minister for the ČSSD.

Nantl admitted that the Strategy cannot be implemented under current conditions, as it also proposes extending the length of overall school attendance and introducing specialized pedagogical professions. "We have been discussing how to make the Strategy real for quite some time," he said, adding that the European Court of Human Rights judgment must be respected so that the country can avoid charges that it is segregating Romani children’s access to education, as 30 % of the pupils attending the "practical primary schools" are of Romani origin.

According to critics of the "practical primary schools", there is a risk that the state will, through segregated schools, raise yet another generation to be dependent on social welfare in the future. A report by the Czech ombudsman from last June found that 35 % of the pupils attending "practical primary schools" are Romani.

"The question arises as to why that is. The ombudsman himself insists it is the result of ongoing discrimination and segregation," Barbora Černušáková, the author of a research report into the education of Romani children for Amnesty International, told Czech Television.

Černušáková says the "practical primary schools" should be gradually transformed into ordinary mainstream primary schools. Children from socially disadvantaged environments may need support that they are not receiving today in the mainstream schools, which is why such support should be offered to them in such schools, for example, through employing greater numbers of teaching assistants.

The government adopted the "Strategy for the Fight against Social Exclusion" in September 2011, which includes the gradual restriction of the "practical primary schools". The children currently attending such schools should be integrated into classrooms at mainstream primary schools. The main aim of the Strategy is to prevent potential discrimination against non-disabled Romani children who are capable of attending mainstream school.

The cabinet’s Strategy mainly responds to criticism from international institutions. The "practical primary schools" were originally to have been closed as of 2015, but for financial reasons the deadline was moved to 2017. During the next two years the ministry intends to focus on how the educational psychological counseling centers work and on restricting the possibility that children who may be merely socially disadvantaged, not "lightly mentally disabled", might be enrolled into the "practical primary schools".

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