Tallinn Deputy Mayor Andrei Kante said the burden of individually assisting young people who fail to meet compulsory education requirements could prompt the city to take legal action against the Ministry of Education.
As of Monday, there were 761 young people in Tallinn who had graduated from basic school but whose plans for continuing their education were not yet known.
Speaking on ETV’s morning program “Terevisioon,” where he gave an overview of the situation and criticized the ministry, Tallinn Deputy Mayor Andrei Kante (Center Party) said Tallinn and other local governments need more places in preparatory education to address the situation.
“The state needs to acknowledge this and begin negotiations with local governments now. Ministry officials have approached the Tallinn Applied College, but these cannot really be called serious negotiations because the school operator does not appear to be aware of what the state intends to do,” Kante said.
Starting September 1, all local governments will automatically begin working with young people who do not have a school place. Kante said this requires an individual approach, with each family contacted and a counseling process initiated. Officials responsible at the Tallinn Education Department will make initial contact and if they are unable to help place the child in a school, child protection specialists will also be brought in.
“The administrative burden on Tallinn is enormous,” Kante said, recalling that when the reform was being planned, the Ministry of Education said it would not increase the administrative burden on local governments.
Kante said the city could consider making a claim against the ministry as current estimates indicate that nearly 600 students will require this kind of individualized approach and one official will certainly not be enough. “We are talking about at least four or five new officials who will be handling these cases,” the deputy mayor said.
Kante did not specify what such a claim might entail, but said taking the matter to court could not be ruled out.
The Tallinn deputy mayor believes the compulsory education reform needs to be reconsidered and redesigned. “In my view, no student should be able to graduate from basic school with inadequate knowledge, so the preparatory education function should remain with the student’s home basic school, so that the connection between the school and the student is not broken and we do not have to track down these students one by one,” Kante explained.
Kante said responsibility for implementing the reform should be shared with vocational schools, which could take responsibility for career counseling.
The deputy mayor said Tallinn is prepared to open new places in preparatory education and not only at Tallinn Applied College as other educational institutions have also expressed an interest in doing so.
“But we need certainty that the state will actually commission additional places. The law does not even provide for any other option because if young people qualify for preparatory education, they must be given those places,” Kante said.
A shortage of teachers is also limiting the creation of new places. If additional places are to be created, recruitment of those teachers would need to begin now, but Kante said the ministry has yet to give the necessary signal.
Tallinn has typically had around 500 basic school graduates each year who have not continued their education.
Kante considers the compulsory education reform necessary in itself because only now has attention begun to be paid to young people who drop out of the education system after basic school. However, for the reform to provide young people with meaningful help, he said the role of basic schools should be strengthened and intervention mechanisms developed so that early identification is effective at the basic school level.
“Then we would not have to talk about young people dropping out after basic school. As it stands, however, the compulsory education reform is largely cosmetic,” the Tallinn deputy mayor said.
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