Prague 18 wants to improve the quality of education in the district | PRAGUE 18 | News
Founders of schools, teachers, parents, representatives of leisure activities and other actors of the Local Action Plan for the Development of Education. They all gathered in the ceremonial hall of the Letňany town hall to openly talk about possible solutions to the issue of digitization and inclusion in education.
“The local action plan is actually focused on the development of education and the support of schools across our district and the Čakovice district,” said Marcela Horešovská, expert guarantor of the MAP II project.
Among the main topics of the conference was the digitization of education, which schools encountered mainly during the coronavirus pandemic, when almost from day one, teaching had to start taking place remotely – that is, from home, via computers.
“Because we had to switch to digital technologies for distance education, we have an expert here today who will introduce us to exactly how digital technology can help schools, not only schools, but everyone, because we all had to switch to education either distance learning or, in many cases, even at the home office,” added Horešovská.
Equal opportunities in education were also a less important topic.
“Equal opportunities, as we perceive it here, as such a broad, overarching broad scale, such an umbrella under which everything possible falls: inclusion, diversity, open communication, transparency, even within schools, to parents of children, to educators and in general between individual key actors,” said Kateřina Kaňuková, moderator of the event and consultant for equal opportunities.
And precisely the diversity of education, or inclusion during classes, is a frequent problem in Czech schools. They struggle with it, for example, at Edvard Beneš elementary school in Čakovice. It is not only here that special positions that help the most with inclusion in schools fail to be filled in the long term.
“The biggest problem at the moment is finding suitable staff for the position of school psychologists, special pedagogues, but also assistants.” The assistants in particular are paid very little,” explained the director of the Dr. Edvard Beneš Elementary School in Prague’s Čakovice.
“Another point is that many teachers do not know how to work with assistants. So teach teachers to be able to use assistants only for the benefit of the one or two children to whom they are assigned, but to use them for all the other children, because the assistant is two extra hands and can help a lot within the whole class,” she added Monika Čadská, director of the Malkovský Kindergarten.
However, insufficient school capacity also applies to the poor integration of children.
“If you have an awful lot of children in your class, it is not realistic to do inclusion in a reasonable way. There needs to be 20 to 25 children moving around in that class and then you could work and use the assistant in a targeted way,” added Čadská.
“We had several projects here. The main project was actually an extension to the pavilion of ZŠ Tupolevova. Here we have an increase of about 250 children. The subsidy was about 120 million,” said Zdeněk Kučera, the mayor of the Prague 18 district.
According to the principals, the current large number of children with a different mother tongue is also related to insufficient capacity in schools. A number of teachers on the problem of a larger group of foreign language children in the classroom. If they are of the same foreign nationality, it is difficult for teachers to convince these children to communicate in Czech and thereby integrate faster. However, due to the lack of classes, it is a problem to redistribute foreign language children evenly in the classes.