Georgia has a once in a generation opportunity to transform the education system in a relatively short period of time. The government has commitment to dramatic budget increases, as well as to large changes in the body of teachers, teacher evaluation and development, methodology and school management as well as large new investments in infrastructure. Together, this is an opportunity to create an education system that is unrecognizably better in 10 years from where it is today.
There is also a big risk. The government has committed to spending money and has brought through initiatives and major changes in almost every aspect of the teaching system. Some of these are almost shockingly bold. However, all of this money and all of this change, creates huge opportunities for waste, and poorly considered policies to create massive change which are not well implemented, could certainly see educational outcomes decline.
GeoWel conducted a research project during the course of 2019, which has investigated and analysed every aspect of Georgia’s general education system including international testing, inclusiveness, infrastructure, financing, curricula and teacher training and development. This overview provides a summary a SWOT analysis of the system and also highlights key areas for further focus. What follows is a summary of our key recommendations.
No-one doubts that the most important element of any educational system is the quality of the teachers. In the most successful education systems, the competition to get onto teaching programs is fierce, attracting the most capable students, training them well and resourcing them and supporting them to succeed
One of the big criticisms of teaching in Georgia is that because of low wages and poor work conditions there was little competition for teacher training positions, so that teacher training was done in relatively small numbers and attracted some of the lowest scoring students. Due to incredibly low turnover in the teaching body, even this small group often could not find teaching jobs. This further undermined the incentives for people to train as teachers.
Both sides of this calculation have recently changed. With salary increases in recent years, a trained teacher, working full time, now makes around 1000 GEL per month. This is a fairly attractive salary in Georgia, and in rural areas would make someone a relatively highly paid professional. Also, with huge investments in infrastructure, new training programs and professional development initiatives, both the working environment and atmosphere of professionalism are likely to go up. It also seems obvious that teaching can bring great personal rewards, in terms of job satisfaction and status, particularly in a culture with a deep respect for learning.
Depending on how reforms progress, the next decade could see a high demand for teachers across the country. By incentivizing teachers who are over the retirement age to finally step-down, the Georgian Government created 5000 teaching vacancies in September 2019. There may be similar numbers of vacancies created again in 2020 if teachers are forced to leave who cannot pass the competency exam, and as an aging work-force continues to retire.
Therefore, teaching as a profession is becoming a more desirable profession to enter, at the same time that places for new teachers are becoming available. This is already having an impact on recruitment – with universities reporting an increase in demand for teacher training places. However, the number of teachers being trained is currently too low to match likely demand, so the government needs to focus on increasing the number of trainee teachers, at the same time as it ensures that competition for those places increases and the very best students are absorbed into the profession.
As a starting point, this could be helped with a large public relations push from government and stakeholders. However, marketing about higher salaries is not enough. Stakeholders need to work together to make sure that becoming a teacher is seen as an important, meaningful and rewarding job – that is also (dare we say it) cool.
Advertising about the opportunities offered by the teaching profession in schools and universities should occur alongside efforts to recognize and reward the best and most successful teachers. There should also be more effort to encourage promotion of teachers into the ‘lead’ and even ‘mentor’ positions. At the moment, these groups are less than 1% of the teaching body. An aggressive push to further train the most successful teachers should also go alongside an increase of the profile and support for school principals. Together, this could also highlight to aspirants that becoming a teacher provides for a potentially rich and diverse professional career path.
At the current time, many of the 1yr 60-credit conversion courses are free, but these are mostly utilized by existing teachers who want to use the study as a means of becoming senior teachers. On top of this, to increase competition, 5yr teacher training should also be free, for pre-specified number of places.
Going even further, to ensure that teacher training is attractive to people from the rural communities who find it hardest to recruit, there should be living allowances for some of the trainee-teachers, particularly if they come from under-represented communities or if they will specialize in one of the most needed subjects. This should be structured so that it is only paid to teachers who remain in teaching for 5 years, most obviously as an interest-free loan that is written off under certain circumstances by the state.
As long as one is getting the best students to become teachers, one needs to ensure that they get the best possible teacher training and professional support, particulary in their first few years as teachers. This could be challenging, given the variability of the schools into which they will be entering, therefore, one needs to be creative about how to provide support structures – within the cohort and with experts and other educationalists across the country.
With so much changing in the educational system, evaluation of results is even more vital than usual. Unfortunately, there are very few measurement mechanisms in place to allow us to confidently track the reforms, to ensure that they are creating the results desired. Students only face standardized exams, if and when they try and get into university. Teachers are being recruited in record numbers, but the teacher evaluation system only externally evaluates teachers if they are trying for promotion. A new school model is being rolled out, when the system lacks even very basic tools for assessing individual school success and failure.
As a starting point, evaluation of students, teachers and any reforms needs all students to take certificate exams which are transparent and trusted and which have an impact on the students lives. This is already the case with the Unified National Exams but, unfortunately, these current exams are only taken around the time of graduation and only serve to facilitate university entrance.
In-line with key recommendations from OSCE earlier this year, instead of the Unified National Exam, there should be a School Graduation Exam that is also used as at least part of the criteria for university entrance. This should be far more condensed than the Graduation Exam that was just abolished, but should include a combination of core and elective subjects.
It is also worth considering a year-9 certificate exam (or year 10, when that becomes the earliest point of school departure), that students take to help guide them on future paths to take. This would then be a part of a final evaluation for students who exit full-time education at that point. Alongside this external exam, teachers should produce a standardized yearly report card. This is another recommendation of the OSCE report and allows the education management information system to track the evaluation of students.
Teacher evaluation also needs to become more systematic, with a larger external component. Teacher evaluation methodologies have evolved in recent years, and some of the innovations have been applauded for providing a minimum metric for assessing competency. However, the only element of outside evaluation is the teacher exams, and the 2015 adjustments to the ‘schema’ system made this less important so that now it is possible for teachers to become qualified (as ‘senior’ teachers) while only passing one of the two teacher competency exams.
At a school level, information on teachers and students needs to be aggregated with data collected by resource centers and other metrics – like the socio-economic circumstances of students, and evaluation of the infrastructure, to start a system for evaluating and scoring public schools. No government agency is ideally placed to undertake this task at the current time. The National Center for Education Quality Enhancement, is supposed to be responsible for school accreditation, but has never accredited public schools. It has nothing like the levels of staff, or the right processes to do this.
In the first instance, this should not be seen as accreditation, since there is no point in pretending to accredit schools that cannot be closed if they fail accreditation. The priority should, therefore, be to use a system of school evaluation, in the first instance, to identify the schools that are most in need of direct intervention and work on ensuring that all schools meet a minimal standard.
To assess policy generally, the Ministry needs to develop a monitoring and evaluation unit, with a broad responsibility to assess reform efforts, using methodologies that are as scientifically rigorous as possible. These would use centrally collected data on a range of metrics collected by the Ministry, as well as international testing that should be continued. On top of that, the new agency would conduct research on proposed new innovations before piloting them. This would allow for the proper piloting of approaches, with a clearly defined M+E structure, to demonstrate a positive effect before broad roll-out. It would also act as an additional source of confidence that reform generally is going in the right direction.
Infrastructure improvements are needed in many if not most Georgian schools, with schools in rural areas facing particular problems with heating and sanitation. The Millennium Challenge Compact conducted a physical infrastructure assessment of all of Georgia’s 2000 or so public schools, though the results of this have not been publicized. This suggested that the overall cost of improving this infrastructure to an acceptable level was about GEL 1.5 billion or a little more than USD 500 million.
Given the spending increases that have been promised by the government, it should be easily possible to bring Georgia’s schools up to the level envisaged by this assessment within a few years.
However, at the current time, even with a large World Bank loan, the spending for 2020 is below the level needed. Also, some of this work has been decentralized to municipal government, others parts are run by the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Regional Development and Infrastructure’s Municipal Development Fund.
The problem with this diversified approach is that there seems to be no strategy for school renovation and while the piecemeal approach that seems be taking place, will undoubtedly result in schools being fixed, it may not fix those most urgently needing repair first, and may lose out on economies of scale.
More importantly, before engaging in a massive renovation campaign, it is necessary that the government review the overall stock of existing schools and identify which schools need to be consolidated, and how to do this in a way where it will create immediate benefits for all communities.
Small village schools are undoubtedly the core of many villages and there will be considerable resistance to closing any of them. However, according to our preliminary analysis, significantly more than half of the schools in Georgia, even in rural communities, are less than 10 mins drive from a neighboring school. At the same time, there are more than 500 schools with fewer than 50 students, which makes it almost impossible to recruit specialist subject teachers and means that the per-student cost of renovation is considerable.
It also seems important that all of these discussions should be as public and transparent as possible, so that people are as convinced as possible, that decisions that are made are done so on a reasonable metric, rather than out of favoritism, corruption, nepotism or political convenience. All of the data on the MCC review, should therefore be public and easily accessible, and once a strategy for infrastructure renewal is developed, it should be widely consulted-on before moving forward.
Income is the biggest determinate of educational outcome, and most analysis of Georgia’s educational system suggests that the division between rich and poor is increasing. While this variation is not as large as in developed countries, there is very little in the Georgian educational system to counteract it. More should be done to attract high quality teachers to low income, rural and isolated areas, including higher salaries. Also, university entrance scholarships should not only be awarded almost entirely based on test scores – which result in most of the money going to wealthier families. An equitable scholarship system, should also factor-in indicators for wealth.
Ethnic minorities and the disabled do even worse than poor families, since they often combine financial difficulties with other challenges. For ethnic minorities and ethnic minority schools, again, there need to be inducements to bring higher caliber multi-lingual teachers (probably from cities) and both physical access and financing need to improve for children with disabilities.
The only obvious gender disparity in Georgian general education is that girls do better across the board and that boys, particularly from socially vulnerable backgrounds, face particular challenges. However, there are issues with the inclusion of girls and women later, since even though Georgian girls do better than boys in maths and science, they remain under-represented in lucrative Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) university education. This needs continued proactive effort to counteract.
The improvements described above will need more resources to be spent on education. A Millennium Challenge Compact review of all of Georgia’s schools, estimated that infrastructure spending of 1.5 billion GEL, would be needed to bring Georgia’s schools up to an acceptable minimum infrastructure standard. Current projected spending on educational infrastructure for 2020 is about 220 million GEL. If this level were to double, then all of the renovation could be done in 5 years.
Increasing the salaries of all the teachers in Georgia to the level of current senior teachers, assuming that they are all required to qualify, or replaced by others that do, will cost 100-150 million GEL per year.
A year or so ago, the government committed that 6% of GDP and 25% of general government spending would go on education. To get to that level the government would have to roughly double spending from the 2020 projected level. This would involve an additional 750 million GEL or so, spent on general education, every year.
This amount, if it were achieved, would therefore be more than enough to allow for the improvements in teacher salaries and infrastructure that the country certainly needs. However, at the moment, we are a long way from this target. Ministry spending on education (excluding culture and sport) currently stands at only 2.6% of GDP, and as such is low compared to most other countries in the region. What is worse, this did not change significantly in 2020, though there have been large commitments, outside the Ministry of Education, for infrastructure.
While 6% is a great target, even reaching 4% of GDP would mean a 50% increase in current spending levels. This would probably cover most immediate needs. However, it is important to stress, that no amount of spending will be sufficient to create the change that is needed. Along with additional resources, there needs to be a strong commitment to engagement with teachers, schools and communities, to help attract teachers into schools, ensure that they are supported in their development, and a strong evaluation system for ensuring that these and other reforms are producing the results that they promise. Only then, will Georgia get the education system that it deserves.
