Prague, Dec 18 (CTK) – Private and church schools fulfill the same role in education as public schools that are financed by the Czech state and so they have the right to receive state subsidies, Tomas Fertek, from the EDUin centre for education, and Martin Cech, an expert in church schools, told CTK on Monday.
Cech, from the section for church schools of the Czech Bishops’ Conference, rejected the view that the Czech Republic is the only country to support private and church schools from state funds that new Prime Minister Andrej Babis (ANO) expressed earlier on Monday.
Fertek said countries support non-public schools in different ways, but “it is not true that no other country supports private schools from the public budget.”
In the Netherlands, for example, a private school can receive from the state the same finances as a public school, unless it is an elite school, Fertek said.
Jiri Nantl, head of the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC), said on Twitter that the funding of private kindergartens and schools is rather common in a number of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries.
Cech said church schools get state subsidies in some form in various European countries. He said believers of different faiths as well as non-believers can attend church schools. Churches also operate a number of special schools for children with serious learning difficulties.
Private and church elementary schools receive the same state subsidies that comparable public elementary schools get. A private or church secondary school receives 90 percent of the subsidy once it is assessed by the school inspection authority well. In their first year of operation, a private or church school receives 60 percent of the subsidy. Tuition is paid at some private or church schools, usually from several thousands to tens of thousands of crowns a year.
Cech told CTK last week that the new government should introduce a better way of financing private and church schools.
Babis said on Monday non-public schools get 6.5 billion crowns a year from the Education Ministry.
Fertek said if the state subsidies were removed from private and church schools, a great part of them would have to eventually close because parents of the students would not be able to pay high tuition.
According to Education Ministry’s data, 13,600 teachers worked in about 1,000 private or church kindergartens, elementary and secondary schools and colleges in the past school year. In total, there are some 155,000 teachers in the Czech Republic.
This year, 94.5 billion crowns from the state budget went to schools ran by regional authorities and 1.5 billion crowns to church schools.
