site.btaDual Education Used in 20 Vocational Schools in Bulgaria

Dual Education Used in 20 Vocational Schools in Bulgaria

Sofia, March 6 (BTA) - At the moment dual education is used in 20 vocational schools in Bulgaria, caretaker Education and Science Minister Nikolai Denkov said on Monday during the opening of the seventh meeting of a forum for dual education.

Denkov said that a call for proposals is to be announced later in the year under the Operational Programme Science and Education for Smart Growth which has a separate project for dual education.

Attending the meeting were the Ambassadors of Switzerland Denis Knobel, of Germany, Detlef Lingemann, and representatives of the Austrian Embassy in Sofia. The three countries have some of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the world, attributed to their systems for dual education.

Ambassador Knobel noted the extremely big effect of the Bulgarian-Swiss project called DOMINO implemented since 2015. At the moment eleven schools in eleven Bulgarian towns and 65 companies work in the project whose name comes from the Bulgarian abbreviation for "Dual Education for the Modern Requirements and Needs of Society".

Ambassador Lingemann said that vocational training in Germany is a cornerstone of the economic success of the country where 50 per cent of the students leaving schools using dual education in 350 vocations after that work in the same area.

The Austrian representatives said that thanks to dual education, 120,000 apprentices work in 35,000 companies in Austria.