Statement by AKEL MP Christos Christofides after the meeting of the Parliamentary Education and Culture Committee

We need a vision and plan for education

1 September 2023, AKEL C.C. Press Office, Nicosia

In recent years, public schools have suffered very severe attacks. Indicative of this is the fact that private primary education over the past five years has increased by 45% and private secondary education by 25%.

We are currently making a huge effort to support public schools so that they can support our children. Education is the vehicle that can lead our children to progress. The gaps noted in the education system destroy human lives, the lives of our children. It is for this reason that we approach education issues with the elaboration and submission of proposals and with great seriousness.

By and large we have an improved picture. We are not saying this because prominent proposals and positions that AKEL has projected in recent years, such as the abolition of quarterly examinations and the abolition of the illegal and unacceptable purchase of services system in education, have been adopted, but because there is a dialogue underway between the political forces, which has been absent in recent years, and a broader effort by the educational stakeholders to support public schools.

Nevertheless, there are still issues on which we have today submitted questions and suggestions to the Minister of Education.

In our view, for the new school student assessment system to succeed, there must be very serious training of teachers and full information for pupils and parents to understand what we want to do, but also to be effective participants as the protagonists of this process.

In terms of the weather conditions affecting our schools, I have listed today the dates that the Ministry of Education has announced over the past five years that air conditioners will be installed in schools. And almost nothing has happened. We would like to hope that this year’s announcements will be different and that real steps will be taken in that direction, because neither teachers nor pupils can create learn in such unacceptable weather conditions.

On the issue of specialist unified education. For ten years we have heard about the legislation due to change, it was all left in limbo because new legislation was going to be introduced to solve the problems. That legislation never came, the problems have been building up from the issues of carers that we have raised today to issues of modernising the treatment of children with disabilities. We want to believe that in the very near future solutions will at long last be provided.

We also raised the very serious issue of the lack of strategic planning for public and private universities and particularly the issue that concerns thousands of students: namely that of unaffordable rents especially in some cities that force young people to abandon university education because of the cost. These are unacceptable phenomena that must be addressed.

The modernisation of all-day schooling so that it can be extended to cover more areas, but also to meet the real needs of our children who, like robots, are running from school to private tuition and do not have time to enjoy their lives, to cultivate their special interests and other skills that are important for children themselves.

The list of issues is endless. We have submitted many proposals and suggestions and in the period ahead we will also submit a memorandum to the Ministry of Education with all our proposals and views.

In conclusion, I would like to stress that we need a vision for education, we need a plan, we need above all to realize that education is a decisive factor for the development of a country, but above all for whether our children will be happy and have the vehicle with which they will take the path to a better life.