The Prime Minister Edi Rama’s remarks at meeting with teachers and parents in the southern coastal city of Vlora to promote the government’s latest initiative to provide text books to primary school children for free:
Thank you very much for attending this meeting! We are here today to promote the government’s latest move in favour of first to fourth-grade schoolchildren this year and the fifth-grade pupils next year and all their parents providing them textbooks for free.
The new textbooks, which, as the Minister of Education said, are not just books but texts of indisputably high quality as we are moving ahead towards finalizing a cycle launched three years ago to replace all deficient textbooks widely contested by teachers and parents alike and criticized by the international bodies with textbooks from Oxford, Cambridge, Pearson and Albanian pupils will now use new textbooks used by their peers in the United Kingdom and not only.
We are very happy to having succeeded in this process and pleased that we now have the opportunity to replace another contribution from parents for their families and children with a state contribution.
We are pleased for gradually being given the opportunity to turn all efforts and sacrifices, painful reforms and austerity measures designed to strengthen the state into an investment for children and families. So, the parents of the schoolchildren of first, second, third, fourth and fifth grade next year will no longer spend money to by textbooks for their children.
On the other hand, it is important to highlight today the fact that children should return the textbooks they get for free at the end of the school year. You should look after the books and return them at end of school year. This is not our invention. We have been criticized and mocked about that, but this is not our invention and it is not just a material matter, but a way to create a special relation with the book. France is not a poor country. It is one of Europe’s richest. France also applies this rule. So I would like wish each and every one of you to experience the parents’ satisfaction you all expect to enjoy when your children go to school for the first time and wish all children experience satisfaction and gain knowledge from this books.
Once again, thank you very much!
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Free of charge textbooks for all primary schoolchildren in first to fourth grade. This is the government’s latest initiative, the first of its kind in the country, which will be applied to all primary schools all over the country and all children without exception.
Prime Minister Edi Rama and the Minister of Education Lindita Nikolla visited Vlora today to launch the initiative during a meeting with local teachers and parents.
Introducing a number of novelties of the new academic year, the Minister of Education noted that schoolchildren in Albania’s education system will be provided new textbooks that meet the European standards. “”There are 400,000 schoolchildren in our entire education system, who are taught with simplified textbooks of European standards. Scientific texts come from “Oxford”, “Cambridge” and “Pearson” and meet contemporary standards, meaning that every Albanian student using these texts will be on an equal footing with their peers at every school in the EU member states.”
The government will place more attention to schoolchildren with special needs, who will be assisted by special tutors who will help them in learning process and teach them differently. “The new school year will begin with an innovation, with the Albanian government committed to attaching special care and attention to the schoolchildren with disabilities. Every pupil with disabilities will be taught by a special tutor, who will assist him during the whole process of learning and education in school. A missing service will be provided in the whole education system, because we found not only zero teacher assistants, but also no study or policy on how to move in this direction. We have employed 700 teacher assistants for children with disabilities.” Education Minister said.
