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26.09.2016"Your Lesson": funding and project activities

 

Project \"Your Lesson\" sets ambitious targets to achieve not only nationally, but also locally in every single school. The basic parameters of funding at least for the first year became clear already. How specifically implementation of school curriculum \"Your Lesson\" will be financed and how it will enable the achievement of the goals?

 

I. Financing of school curricula \"Your Lesson\" will follow three basic principles:

 

1. The annual budget for extracurricular activities will be formed based on all students in daily form of education in the school, although not all students are expected to be involved in the activities.

 

Each school will receive funding for the activities included in school curricula \"Your Lesson\" according to the following table:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(To clarify that \"conditionally fixed expenses\" are also allocated for extracurricular activities. They are not for repairs or equipment - such costs are not eligible under this operation. They will not cover fees for Director / Accountant: their fees will be determined beyond that table and will be paid extra out of this budget)

 

At the same time it is expected these funds to be sufficient for schools to include at least the following percentages of students in extracurricular activities:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In fact, in most \"restrictive\" option in extracurricular activities may be included even only 37% of students (if participating in the activities of interests and activities to overcome learning difficulties are the same they may be involved in both activities) and target values for reached students who the Ministry of education requires will be achieved. Probably in most cases at school level in activities financed under \"Your Lesson\" will be included about 50-60% of the students. This means that in practice the funding of participating pupil will be significantly higher than given in the first table.

 

An example: if a school has a hundred and fifty students and you choose to include in extracurricular activities half of them, the parameters of Your Lesson will be as follows, according to the group to which the school belongs:

 

 

 

 

 

2. Activities to overcome learning disabilities are a focus in the project and therefore the more such activities are required, the greater the budget of the school is: thus schools, classified in Group 1 received two times higher funding than those in Group 7. In fact that difference is justified: in the first group at least 60% of the funds received must be used for activities to overcome learning difficulties, and in the seventh group this percentage is only 8. At the same time the maximum number of students in groups for various activities is different: 10 in activities to overcome learning difficulties and 25 in activities of interest. I.e. schools in Group 1 objectively will need to form more groups. And that means more teaching hours, respectively - a larger budget: paid each hour, regardless of the number of students.

 

Going back to the example of the school with 150 students, it should allocate the following budget for activities to overcome learning difficulties:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The big challenge for any school is to offer appropriate activities that will help identified students to overcome learning difficulties. Standard extra classes in Bulgarian language and mathematics will hardly have any effect other than to bore students and make them hate school. And finally, \"Your Lesson\" is not for a few extra lessons in Bulgarian language or Mathematics, but for innovative shapes that can lead to increased motivation and overcoming learning difficulties. We need innovative forms: eg. Bulgarian language can be taught through theater classes, folklore and culture classes, etc. The schools within the program \"Every students will be a  winner\", where learn children whose mother tongue is not Bulgarian have already gained enough experience of such innovative practices. One of them is the school \"G.S.Rakovski\" -  the village of Golyamo novo and the prepared by them during the year \"Textbook of kindness\". More practices can be found on www.romaeducation.com.

 

 

 

It is important to notice that it provides at least 5 hours of activities to overcome learning difficulties to be conducted jointly with parents, ie parents can enter the class and tell about their profession, about the traditions in his / her family from the past, can be included in forum theatre, organized within the classes. Parents will not be paid for this activity, it is voluntary.

 

It is possible within these hours to be conducted individual consultations with children and parents.

 

3. Allocations are fees for teachers, materials, external services, etc., there is no fixed ratio between these budget lines. Project SUCCESS was valuable because schools managed to use a lot of materials for extracurricular activities and organized numerous events etc. Your Lesson provides funds for it. With these funds the schools will be able to purchase educational products, to provide costumes for students and scenery, to participate in festivals etc.

 

II. Registration in \"Your Lesson\" Platform  (http://tvoiatchas.mon.bg/). In the platform every school has a profile; it must (among other required things) to register \"Suggested activities of the school,\" in Category TYPE \"Activities of interest\" or \"Activities to overcome learning difficulties\" with the appropriate characteristics concerning age, frequency, minimum and maximum number of participants in the groups and sub-thematic area. Currently it is not required to indicate who will lead groups of school. Group leaders and their personal information - qualifications, experience, discipline taught, should be also registerred. NB! Please note that registration is not only for pedagogical experts, thus if you have non-teaching staff who also want to engage, this form should be used to be registerred (parents, who are part of the staff at school but are not teaching professionals can be engaged this way)

 

NB! The platform is open for registration until October 7 and till then making changes and adding new things is possible.

 

NB! A basic requirement for the project is the activities, offered by the school to be based on the needs and wishes declared by the students and their parents (Appendix 1 and 2) and be approved by the Public Council \"Your Lesson\"

 

After closing the Platform for registration, it will automatically detect the wanted activities and offered ones by the school or by outside contractors.

 

III. Public Council \"Your Lesson\" NB! It is different from the Public Council, which each school must choose according to Art. 270 of APSE. September 18 was the deadline for registration of the Public Council \"Your Lesson\" in the Platform. Full composition of the Council may be not clear at some places (if, for example, the municipality or the relevant funding body has not yet authorized representative). In this case the available members should be filled in and the rest are added extra.

 

 

 

Open issues

 

Unfortunately, the project does not provide funding for working with parents and relatives of students. Although it requires inclusion of such activities in school curricula \"Your Lesson\", no such funding will be allocated. Any expense connected with parents (even travel costs for the parents, for example, to participate in motivational meeting with their children) will not be covered. The formal reason is that parents are not targeted, which is too narrow interpretation of the Regulation of the European Social Fund. The regulation allows costs for participants who are not targeted as they are incurred in relation to the target group, but the project did not have it. \"Your Lesson\" will not finance activities with parents and this is one of the many serious shortcomings of the project.

 

The effectiveness of financing another one of the activities, to be included in school curricula \"Your Lesson\": inter-school extracurricular activities, also remains doubious. These could be financed, but there is no standard and requirement for a minimum percentage of the funding. The possibility of organizing inter-school extracurricular activities remains a good wish, which will probably benefit only the most enterprising directors. This is also a serious omission.

 

 

 

The parameters and methods to finance school curricula \"Your Lesson\" may change: as of next school year and even from the present one. Time will tell which of the gaps will be significant and which ones will be adjusted.

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