A National Leadership Institute in education will be created by October to manage a network of mentors from among the best teachers, of up to 1,000 persons. These will help both young specialists from schools and the whole education community to improve the teaching skills. This is a priority on the Ministry of Education and Research’s list of priorities and views that were presented on Tuesday by Minister Dan Perciun, IPN reports.

The minister said the National Leadership Institute will be first created and mentors will be later recruited and trained. The mentors will be selected from among the best teachers who will support the young specialists in schools and the whole education community to improve teaching skills, to implement information technology. The mentors will get extra pay.

The Ministry will also cover professional formation and training courses for at least 3,000 teachers. Dan Perciun said nearly 40% of the teachers in the system now do not have an academic rank and often the teachers cannot get a rank because they do not have financial resources to attend continuous formation courses. The Ministry will finance these courses with state budget funds and will cover the re-qualification costs for teachers who want to also teach other subjects.

The per-student financing formula will be reviewed and the costs for academic ranks will be covered separately. The revision of the formula will enable the Ministry to provide additional support to schools where there are many teachers with academic ranks and where the levels of knowledge and skills are higher.

The Ministry will promote the prestige of the profession of teacher through communication campaigns and will implement a mechanism for protecting teachers from any form of violence as the teachers more often report different kinds of incidents at school and they do not always feel safe in the school community in the absence of a protection instrument. Among the priorities are the digitization and de-bureaucratization of the teaching process as the teachers should spend less time completing forms and more time in classrooms.

Dan Perciun noted that about 25% of the teachers are of retirement age and the figure will yet grow. It is therefore important to attract young specialists to the sector. The Ministry suggests increasing the number of graduates of teacher training faculties who go to work in the education system to at least 500 persons a year.