SONK will activate the decision for general strike in education and culture if concrete solutions are not found until the end of this calendar year, said President Jakim Nedelkov at today’s press conference.
– From 1st to 18th of January, when the students are on their winter break, in the first week, the Council of SONK will hold a session, on which the results of the negotiations will be discussed in detail and a decision will be brought. Our position is very clear: if SONK doesn’t come to satisfactory results through negotiations came until the 31st of December, the decision for strike, which was put on hold, will be again activated – said Nedelkov.
He said that even after three months of negotiations, there was no meeting with the Ministry of Culture. They had several meetings with the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, and the negotiations with the Ministry of Education and Science were most intensive.
He explained that some of the demands were initially rejected as a matter of negotiation, such as the demand for correction of salaries in primary and secondary education.
According to him, there are also no specific answers to the question of valuation, i.e. rewarding and penalizing teachers by external tests.
Regarding the external evaluation, Nedelkov said that it’s not controversial when used as a tool for verifying the quality of education, and that there are such examples in many countries. According to him, it’s disputable that there is no country where this assessment is related to teachers’ salaries, i.e. with their penalizing.
