Hours With One Student

This primary cycle teacher works at two Podujevo municipality schools to reach a 20-hour teaching rate a week.

I work in one school and two at a school, and two at”, shows the teacher, who needs to go from the school “Zahir Pajaziti” in the village of Orlan, to the divided parallel of this school in the village of Braina about four kilometers away.

The school in the village of Braina has only 25 students from preschool to ninth grade.

The fifth and seventh classes in this school have only one student, while all other classes do not have a number of four students.

It's hard for teachers too. With a student working 40 minutes, it's not easy. Then, even the student does not feel well in the company of 12 or 13 other students”, Bajrami says.

Both he and his colleague say that regardless of the circumstances, keeping the school open in Braina is of special importance, for they say it is the only thing keeping the few people in the area there. Braina village has about 12 houses inhabited.

In Kosovo, the trend of reducing the number of students is continuing for many years.

Kosovo Statistics Agency data shows that in 2020/2021 school year there were more than 47 thousand students less than in the 2015/2016 school year.

According to the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and innovation in Kosovo, the reasons for this are different: from the decline of nightiness to migration of the population either outside or inside.

But the decline in the number of students has also begun to present problems in the functioning of the educational system because, reportedly, the surplus of teachers.

MA SHTI announces to Radio Free Europe that surplus is about 2,000 teachers in different Kosovo municipalities.

However, according to the ministry, “this does not mean that teachers are not engaged in the better education system”.

Education Minister Arberie Nagavci, at a Kosovo Assembly session held on April 28th, has warned that institutions will do a broad research to get a clearer mirror of problem.

“From next month [May], we will start a visit, co-operation and a check, to see the real situation in the municipalities, see where we have technological surplus, and where, in turn, we lack the number of teachers”, Nagavci said.

It wasn't known from August that this research was already under way.

In Kosovo, management of the pre-university education system is done mainly by the municipal level. But AugustI leads to the creation of policies that affect this educational level as well.

What are the extra - teaching teachers?

Teachers' work in Kosovo is regulated by the Law on Pre-university Education and With The Kolektive contract, which the United Education Union in Kosovo has signed with the Ministry of Education.

This contract explains the issue of overexcessive teachers or, otherwise, “technological pressure”.

A teacher may be introduced into the category of technological excesses in some cases, including the closure of classes or schools, which may then lead to the elimination of classes/work hours a teacher has.

According to this contract, if a teacher loses his job, depending on the experience of that teacher, he is paid several monthly wages while the teacher awaits the creation of classes for him.

By contract, the Communist Education Directors are obliged to try to system teachers and complete their classes. They have no right to open contests for the same position of work without a teaching that is technological surplus.

A teacher may be engaged at a full rate of 20 hours a week or half a ten-hour rating.

However, both August and the United Education Union in Kosovo say that, currently, there are no regular contract teachers left without classes.

The problem is that teachers should be transported from school to school to reach their work rate and have to work in schools that have very few students in class.

SBASK vs. “cut”

The chairman of the United Education Union in Kosovo, Nundman Jashari, says it opposes the term “teprice” for teachers.

“Even with those few students, the teacher goes to class and keeps the watch as if there were dozens of students in that box”, says Jashar for Radio Free Europe.

Under the legislation in effect, a class of learning is designed to have a minimum of 17 students and a maximum 32.

This means that classrooms with few students or even schools must be closed or united to reach the student's required number.

Given the Law on Pre-university Education, the Ministry of Education could issue a sublegal act for setting the criteria for establishing pre-university education institutions and eliminating their activities.

In 2019, because of the small number of students, the Kamenica municipality has decided to shut down 19 schools from 29. This decision has been conveyed with numerous protests and discontent in that municipality, especially by the community of teachers.

Jashari says the Government of Kosovo should make a long-term plan, given the situation with the reduction of the number of students, rather than making quick decisions for school or class closures.

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Pristina's GAP research institute has conducted an investigation in 2021 about the problem of student absence and the surplus of teachers in Kosovo municipalities.

Full data from only 19 Kosovo municipalities has been obtained in this research.

According to them, there are 340 classes in Kosovo that have five and fewer students and 642 classes that have fewer than ten students.

Bekim Salihu, from the GAP Institute, says the employment of teachers in municipalities has been done without any analysis of their need.

<x0Institutions, instead of doing some sort of restructuring and reforming of the educational system, have followed the opposite logic, so they have not adapted the aspect of employment to the number of students in the respective municipalities and municipalities”, Salihu says.

According to him, schools with few students and many teachers negatively affect Kosovo's budget, but also the students' school experience.

The average salary teachers receive in pre-university education in Kosovo is 470 euros per month.

The Edgood Institute, which deals with education issues in Kosovo, has also made an analysis regarding the structure of the education system.

According to her, about 17 percent of Kosovo's educational institutions have fewer than 50 students.

The director of this institute, Youth Qehaja, tells Radio Free Europe that “demographic productions of the population are not unknown to the” institutions.

“The failure of institutions is the only miracle”, he says.

According to Qehaja, restructuring of schools should be done at the country level and initiated as reform by the Ministry of Education.

Any initiative for restructuring educational institutions should be based on demographic projections, teacher-hour fund and student welfare”, he estimates.

According to data from the Kosovo Statistics Agency, nature in the country has been declining steadily since 2014. In that year, the number of live births was 25,929. In 2019, there were 21,798 births, and last year 18,188.