Deputy Minister of Education Mahmut Özer wrote an article to a newspaper about an important project of the Ministry aiming at improvement of school environment suffering from high lack of attendance and drop-outs.

 

Here are the excerpts from his article: Vocational training makes an important contribution to economic development by offering human resources that business market needs and also serves as an important instrument in reducing youth unemployment figures. Moreover, vocational training has a potential to make an important contribution to social integration by teaching skills to young people who are relatively unsuccessful in academic terms.

 

When compared with other types of schools, vocation training suffers more from lack of attendance and drop-out problems.

 

Basic reason of this problem is low motivation and lack of basic skills. All countries are working in an effort to reduce high low attendance and early drop-out rates in vocational schools.

 

Early drop-out brings many risks such as unemployment, poverty and social isolation for these young people.

 

Within this context, early drop-out is among basic problems of education systems of all countries and is used as an important indicator in the assessment of education systems of countries.  

 

When compared with other types of other schools, lack of attendance or low attendance and the drop-out rate is relatively high in our country. Especially due to parameter and transition from primary to secondary education (TEOG) practices caused students who have relatively low academic and basic skills to pile up in vocational schools. Vocational schools turned into disadvantaged education institutions and graduates of these schools suffered difficulties in enrolling to higher education and disadvantaged working conditions in the business market. When these combined with personal problems, students showed high lack of attendance or they dropped out. Increase in the high lack of attendance and early drop-out rate caused series of other social problems in addition to increase in the young unemployment rate in the country.

 

The Ministry of National Education has been working in an effort to reduce this rate for a long time. After the declaration of 2023 Education Vision, important steps were taken in the reinforcement of vocational education.

 

The Covid-19 pandemic process revealed how fast the production capacity of vocational schools can be activated and these schools can produce most needed products in a short period of time. In this light, the Ministry continues to initiate a number of important projects in order to increase the quality of vocational training and improve the schools environment in vocational schools. "1000 Schools in Vocational Education Project" aims at improving the conditions in 1000 vocational and technical schools which have disadvantaged conditions. As a part of this project, we have selected 1000 vocational high schools in 81 cities of our country in order to improve the conditions in these schools.

 

Within this context, libraries, design and skill workshops as well as culture-arts and sports areas will be established in these schools. It is decided to implement positive discrimination for vocational school students in national and international cultural, artistic and sports activities. On the other hand, Directorate General of Special Education and Guidance Services will provide intensive guidance and counseling services.

 

PISA researches concerning vocational school students revealed that they showed lower performance in Turkish, math and science literacy than students from other types of schools. As a part of the project, the Ministry will organize additional supportive courses in order to improve the basic skills of these students.

 

Important social contribution  

Most important of all, this will make a positive contribution to our education system in terms of equality of education and opportunity.  In the light of this, the Ministry of National Education will start an improvement project for these schools. Finally, this project will make a very important social contribution in order to increase equality of educational opportunity.