The Latvian Education and Science Workers’ Union (LIZDA) should “fight” less with the Ministry of Education and Science (MES), but together with the ministry should address education quality issues, Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš (JV) said at a press conference after the government meeting on Tuesday.
The Prime Minister expressed his concern that according to the data of the Ministry of the Interior, a dangerous gap in the quality of knowledge between urban schools and rural schools is emerging.
“The data show that trends such as functional illiteracy are increasingly widespread in Latvia,” Kariņš said, noting that he called on “all parties to fight less, but to talk about the quality of education”.
According to the Prime Minister, LIZDA should also be involved in this process.
Taking into account that the Minister of Education and Science Anda Čakša (JV) rejected LIZDA’s demand to resign, the trade union planned to turn to Kariņš on Tuesday, July 4, demanding urgent solutions to fulfill the teachers’ strike agreement.
The head of the teachers’ union Inga Vanaga told the LETA agency that the minister’s decision not to resign “was predictable” and that it is “a matter of attitude”, because in the two months since the teachers’ strike, Čakša has not provided correct calculations and amendments to legal acts on the funding procedure for teachers.
Vanaga believes that this is a frivolous attitude towards teachers, emphasizing that local governments should already know whether there will be enough funding to know what salary to offer new teachers.
The representative of the teachers’ union emphasized that the goal of the union is to ensure that the agreement of the teachers’ strike is fulfilled in full.
LIZDA hopes that during this week it will be possible to reach an agreement with the government on meeting the demands of the teachers’ strike. Otherwise, an emergency meeting of the trade union council will be called, where further action will be decided.
On June 30, LIZDA decided to demand Chaksha’s resignation, because the union’s request to accept amendments to all the necessary regulations of the Cabinet of Ministers (MK) on the funding procedure for educators has not been fulfilled, nor has an agreement been reached regarding balancing the workload of educators in the following years.
As the reasons for the request for Chaksha’s resignation, the trade union also cites “offering ill-considered solutions and making hasty decisions” regarding the optimization of school networks and the redistribution of funding to the Ministry of Health, as well as the “unprofessional, late and erroneous” conduct of centralized exams and the announcement of results, which “has created chaos in education in institutions, despair in pedagogues, confusion and ignorance about the possibilities of continuing education in children and parents”, says the resignation request.
2023-07-04 19:40:42
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