Prague, Sept 17 (CTK) – Around 90 million crowns annually instead of the current 13.2 million may go to schools for instruction of foreigners, the Education Ministry will probably propose this to the government, Education Deputy Minister Jaroslav Fidrmuc said yesterday.
The sum includes programmes in support of the refugees’ culture and identity, Fidrmuc said at a round-table discussion on the issue.
According to the Czech School Inspection, 20,102 children with another mother language but Czech attended school in the 2014/15 school year.
Of the total, more than 5000 were children with Czech citizenship for whom Czech is not the mother tongue. Unlike foreigners, they are not entitled to free language education.
Currently, 22.4 percent of students need language support, but only about one fifth of them receive it.
Around a half of elementary schools said they have at least one student with a different mother tongue.
Kristyna Tinterova, from the META organisation that focuses on the issue, said there are still schools that do not pay any attention to foreign children. In rare cases, schools refuse to admit foreigners who do not speak Czech.
The Inspection found out that teachers who teach Czech to the foreigners have not been trained in it and that the parents who do not know Czech may have problems in communicating with schools that do not prepare foreign-language texts for them.
($1=24.096 crowns)
