site.btaDiscussion on Improving Quality of Bulgarian Education Held in Sofia

A discussion on how education can improve the demographic picture was held here Thursday within the 5th national forum Business and Regions, organized by BGlobal magazine. The discussion was attended by Svetla Kostadinova, Executive Director of the Institute for Market Economics (IME), Mihail Nenov, Deputy Mayor of Burgas, Nikolay Denkov, representative of the CC-DB coalition, former prime minister of Bulgaria and former caretaker education minister, Denitsa Sacheva, representative of GERB political party and former minister of labour and social policy, among others.

The discussion was opened by Svetla Kostadinova from IME with a report titled Education and Regional Development - Common Touches. In it, the economist presented the direct link between the level of education of the local population and the degree of economic development of the regions. Kostadinova also presented information according to which there are whole regions of the country where the share of the population with primary education and lower is over 50%.

Regarding the regional disparities reported in the IME report, Sacheva was adamant that there can be no universal solutions and efforts to find them should stop. To this end, decentralisation of decisions in the education system is needed, taking into account the characteristics and needs of individual regions and localities, individual children and existing cultural models.

According to Nikolay Denkov, it is a common practice to confuse the measures taken for access to education with the measures for the quality of education. He said there has been progress in terms of coverage. However, on the quality policies in education, Denkov was adamant that there is a serious political problem in implementing policies in this direction, such as the value added methodology.