She is currently on a UNESCO mission at the behest of the UN to work out an education quality improvement strategy and so her talks with Minister of Education Mārīte Seile had mostly to do with these issues.
“How do we train teachers, what improves their qualifications and quality of their work, what do we do with rural regions, how to develop inclusive education? All these themes are of great concern to us,” affirmed Bokova.
She gave high marks to Latvia’s work in balancing quality with access to education and also discussed curricular content and ongoing professional pedagogical training issues.
On her part, Seile added “if we want to ensure the kind of knowledge, skills and attitudes for our pupils and students to be competitive in the job market, to themselves create those jobs, for them to be personalities, it’s not enough to just have a few correct textbooks, it’s not enough to have digital technologies, we must completely and definitely have teachers and staff who feel comfortable in their fields of competence and can offer that to their pupils and students.”
