Fifteen years ago, Georgia took the decision to radically change its approach to children with special educational needs (SEN). The change led to the abandoning of decades of Soviet and post-Soviet practice that saw children with severe needs were either educated in separate, often inadequate institutions, or just kept at home. Children with less severe needs, meanwhile, were left to go it alone in regular school with no extra support. From 2004, the country embarked upon a journey to create an inclusive learning environment for all children.
Most of the cheaters were first-year students, who because of the COVID-19 pandemic were forced to start their college experience remotely. Tsotskolauri said the problem only got worse as the year progressed, as he played a game of whack-a-mole with students’ increasingly pervasive and elaborate cheating schemes.
On leaving office in 2013, Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, remarked that if he’d spent as much of the state budget on the country’s education system as he had on the armed forces, Georgia would be in a much stronger position today. Eight years later, in 2021, Georgia’s education spending is double the defence budget,
During lockdown, delivery drivers are risking their lives to escape debt.
Teaching is not a popular vocation in Georgia. Despite the continuing efforts, in interviews we conducted as part of the U.S. Embassy-funded Georgian Educational Advocacy Project, it is clear that teachers feel undervalued. As a tool to counteract this image of teachers and teaching, in 2017 an NGO, the Education Coalition (EFA), started the National Teacher Award.
Education was meant to be the means Georgia would achieve the civic integration of its ethnic minority communities. As Tamar Burduli discovered, there is still a long way to go.
The article by Tamar Burduli, Senior Researcher at GeoWel Research was published at Civil.ge. In March 2020, in response to the pandemic, Georgia’s 2000 schools closed their doors, and the country’s 600,000 students switched to online classes. Many of those schools remained closed for a whole academic year. While COVID-19’s effect on the economy, on
Georgia has long aspired to be at the heart of Europe. As the EU’s ambitious goals on climate change have given Georgia a great opportunity. How would Georgia set out to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality?
The country has one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in Europe, a situation exacerbated by the pandemic. When a young man walked into a payday lender in Tbilisi and took 19 people hostage on November 20, brandishing what appeared to be a rifle and hand grenades, it looked at first glance like a simple robbery.
Georgia has a once in a generation opportunity to transform the education system in a relatively short period of time.
