site.btaSecondary School Principals Association Head: STEM Classrooms, Digital Backpack among 2023 Achievements in School Education

In an interview for BTA, the head of the Association of School Principals in Secondary Education, Assen Aleksandrov, listed the positive changes in school education in 2023 and what could be improved in 2024. According to him, among the most positive changes are the preparation for the opening of STEM classrooms in every school in Bulgaria and the launch of the Digital Backpack platform of the Ministry of Education and Science. 

The STEM classrooms are being prepared with BGN 500 million under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Every school in Bulgaria will thus have modern classrooms for natural sciences, with equipment for various scientific experiments that will make the education more practical. In 2023, schools applied with projects, and in 2024 the STEM classrooms will start/finish being constructed, Aleksandrov explained.

The Digital Backpack platform offers digital resources in every school subject from first to twelfth grade that are constantly being enriched. The information there is provided by various textbook publishing houses but also by teachers, he said.

According to him, Bulgarian students’ poor results in the PISA international student assessment show that Bulgarian education should be redirected towards what is in demand in the 21st century: life and work skills. “We are bad not at knowledge but at its application. The changes can happen by changing assessment methods or by giving indicators of what is important for us. Those indicators are the national exams in fourth, seventh, and tenth grade and the state matriculation exams in twelfth grade. Through them, we should assess what PISA assesses and is in demand in life. That is related to putting knowledge into practice, and not learning facts by heart and repeating them,” he argued.