About 1,000 students abandoned schooling in Kosovo, teachers have more than they need in schools

109 students from the first grade to the ninth grade and 883 other high school students have abandoned schooling over the past year. This has made 1600 teachers more than are needed in the education system.

The Ministry of Education will recommend that municipalities be careful to replace retired teachers by revamping those currently employed. There are about 400-500 teachers who retire during the year, for whom even education connoisseurs say the most appropriate solution would be to re-organize those in the educational system.

Deputy Minister of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation Dukagjin Pupovci said that last year, too, there has been a surplus of teachers, but, as he says, to preserve this number of teachers must be worked with small classes.

It has been found that for this year the surplus is 1298 teachers and this is a situation we've found in schools. In the meantime, it is true that this surplus next year increases because of the reduced number of students... Usually in schools to preserve this number of teachers is employed by smaller classes, such as if a class of 30 students is formed, two classes of 15 students are formed, which then enabled this number of educators to remain in system”, Pupovci noted.

Pupovci has also spoken of addressing this problem, saying that since next year they will seek municipalities not to replace retired teachers without a literal analysis.

Starting next year, we're just going to ask the municipalities not to replace them without a literal analysis of teachers who retire so that I don't harm those in the system. Then the idea is to start paying custody hours, now counting hours, about 447 tutors engage full-time. They do not maintain full-time custody, but in this form they are met by standards of people who do not have the norm, and another form is the idea of introducing middle management through schools, where teachers will engage in the quality of active heads and a number of hours will be dedicated to exercising the function of active chairman, so this too affects a considerable number of teachers and thus can achieve a harmonisation in the number of pupils, which is in the number of children, which is in the number of reductions and learnings, which is preserving the levels of past (4)

He says that it is not necessary for the teachers who retire during the year to be replaced by young people, since it can become class reorganization.

About 400-500 teachers during the year retire, so it is not necessary for these teachers to be replaced by youths in such cases when the teacher retires, and the municipalities should think about it. Then these new school functions, such as custody clocks, and so forth, allow teachers to continue their work but to be loaded with other tasks that have not been given until now as mandatory tasks and thus achieve a certain balance”, Pupovci follows.

According to him, the most harmful rejection is when children abandon forced schooling. He also mentioned the reasons why students who leave school.

In compulsory schooling, we've had 109 students last year who have abandoned or 0.05%, so they're classrooms one to nine. So abandoning is more sensitive at this age because it's about compulsory schooling. In the meantime last year in middle education we had 883 abandonrs, that's where the number is greater, or 1.19 %, it's mostly about male gender and it's mostly about economic causes. So in compulsory education, it happens because these children have to engage in helping their family or it happens because the family neglects the child's regular continuation and in all primary and lower high schools, there are teams to prevent abandonment and response to abandonment, which in such situations take steps, even to get parents to send their children back to school. That's why this number is relatively small because we have an immediate reaction. However, there is abandoned, on a small scale but there is... As far as secondary schooling is concerned, the situation remains different, mainly leaving professional schoolchildren and abandoning those times when they find jobs”, he said.