“Education reform has been buried and the critics have been removed,” is how the Initiative of Slovak Teachers, the organiser of several strikes calling for improving the conditions in the education system, responded to the latest changes at the Education Ministry.

Under the original plan, the ministry was expected to start working on implementing the necessary changes in education reform at the end of last year. Instead, Education Minister Martina Lubyová has postponed the beginning of some processes, after she called the document, titled Learning Slovakia, inapplicable in practice.

Moreover, she adopted several other changes concerning the operation of her department at the end of last year, particularly the changes in her and the state secretaries’ powers and the dissolution of the Institute of Education Policy (IVP), the ministry’s analytical body.

The decision, whose aim, in the ministry’s words, was to “make the operation more efficient, strengthen the analytical body and reduce the number of administration employees”, met with critical responses from the opposition, teachers’ associations and experts. They point to the fact that they have not been discussed enough.

“Moreover, they took place during the Christmas holiday, which is neither standard process nor right timing for increasing the quality of any organisation’s operation,” Renáta Hall, head of the To Dá Rozum (Learning Makes Sense) project, told The Slovak Spectator...read more on Slovak Spectator