A new school year is upon us. Once again, it’s been a mad dash for the people in charge to get everything ready in time. This happens every year, because schools are alive, education is a living thing, and living things don’t wait for anyone to be ready.
The goal, obviously, is to keep the problems to a minimum. And every year, something crops up at the eleventh hour. What matters isn’t whether snags appear (they always do), but whether they’re allowed to derail the smooth running of our schools once term actually starts.
One thing is beyond dispute: practical problems hit the day-to-day running of schools hard, and they hit students and teachers alike. Lessons, school life, all of it needs to happen in the right environment. That, we’d argue, isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the bare minimum.
With the new school year about to begin, the Education Ministry has announced a string of measures aimed at improving and upgrading the education system. These were laid out a few days ago before the House Education Committee by the Education Minister, Athina Michaelidou.
There’s a lot on the list, and it touches every corner of the system: from the long-overdue increase in school escorts for children with disabilities and learning difficulties, to the Digital School, to all-day schools, right through to extending free, compulsory pre-primary education down to age four years and four months.
Plenty of these measures, though, are really about problems that have been sitting there for years, unaddressed. Prefab classrooms. Air conditioning that still isn’t installed. Cameras for safety and security. Then there are the live issues too: staffing shortages, and the push to upgrade Music and Sports schools, as well as Technical Education, including expanding the Technical Gymnasium scheme. On that last point, it’s worth saying: despite officials viewing the Technical Gymnasium very favourably, the numbers of children actually enrolling remain low. That needs addressing if the aim is to get more children into it.
A school system that runs well, with problems kept to a minimum, depends on preparation and on everyone involved pulling together. That preparation was done in good time, over the summer months. Issues were dealt with.
It’s the same gamble, every single year. And in the end, everyone is judged by the result. But the goal, at least, is one we all share.
