Minister of National Education Mahmut Özer, pointed out that education is the most important instrument in increasing the human capital of countries at the ceremony held at Gölbaşı Mogan Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School Application Hotel. Explaining that this data indicates that Türkiye could not use its human resources very efficiently in the 2000s, Özer said, "Three important steps have been taken in the last twenty years. The first is physical investment. While there were 300 thousand classrooms in the entire education system in the 2000s, we have around 857 thousand classrooms today.

 

Underlining that another issue is the social policies implemented in education, Minister Özer said that in the last two decades, a budget of 525 billion liras has been used for applications such as conditional education aid, hostels, bussed education, free meals, free textbooks so that the children of socioeconomically disadvantaged families can meet with education. Expressing that the third important step is the removal of anti-democratic practices that hinder education such as the headscarf ban and the coefficient application, Özer said that an education system that is much more sensitive to social demands has been put forward in the last two decades.

 

He went on to say, "At this point, the enrollment rate at the age of 5 has increased from 11 percent to 99 percent, the schooling rate in primary school has increased to 99.63 percent, the schooling rate in secondary school has increased to 99.44, and the schooling rate in secondary education has increased to 95 percent,". Özer expressed his gratitude to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the leader of this three-dimensional development.

 

Noting that they set out to build 3,000 new kindergartens in 2022 to make pre-school education much more widespread and increase accessibility, Özer said, "The number of kindergartens in Türkiye was 2,782. The schooling rate for three-year-olds is 9 percent, for four-year-olds. The enrollment rate at the age of 16 was 16 percent, and the enrollment rate at the age of five was 65 percent." he reminded.

 

Özer said, "What was our aim by building 3,000 new kindergartens? It was to end the universalization phase in education in Türkiye, and together we carried out a huge mobilization as the Ministry. We created a capacity of 6 thousand 4 kindergartens in one year." he said.

 

Özer emphasized that, thanks to this, the schooling rate for three-year-olds increased from 9 percent to 16 percent, the schooling rate for four-year-olds from 16 percent to 38 percent, and the five-year-old schooling rate from 65 percent to 99 percent.

 

"We solved the entire preschool problem last year." Özer said, "There is a need under two headings at the current point, "The first is to control the absenteeism and dropout rates of current students. The second is to definitely include our unregistered students in the education system. That is what we are here for today. I hope we will include them in the education system without leaving a single student out."

 

Thank you all so much. Hopefully, by the end of March, we will have completely solved the problem of non-schooling in secondary education.