On June 24th and 25th, the Alliance of active NGOs in the field of Child and Family Social Protection (APSCF) organised a workshop on planning and budgeting for education, in which representatives of 16 NGOs in the territory, members of the Education group for All (EFA) of the Alliance, studied the aspects related to the financing of inclusive education and analysed the connection of money with the needs of ensuring quality educational services.
According to the trainer Tatiana Savva, public finance expert and Program Manager at Expert Grup, ”the success achieved by the Republic of Moldova in education is due to the creation of the inclusive education fund and the delimitation of financial resources for the inclusion of children with special needs in education. However, the funding formula per student and the insufficiency of up to 2% to ensure inclusive educational support as a whole remain major issues to be addressed in the future.”
Lorina Ghițu, Program Manager at CCF, participant at the training, considers that inclusive education currently lacks the quality in the services provided. “When a support staff in a school is responsible for assisting five children with special needs, we can not talk about quality care provided”, said Ms. Ghitu.
The trainer Tatiana Savva gave a message of encouragement to the participants – each of us has the power and the opportunity to take part in budget planning for education, but we must not forget that any change takes time in Moldova. Therefore, civil society is encouraged to get involved in an advocacy campaign highlighting the fact that we need to reform the funding formula for inclusive education, we need speech therapists, psycho-educators, well-paid support staff, we need to develop the school infrastructure and to better communicate with all the structures responsible for planning and implementing the educational process.
The workshop, whose agenda can be consulted here, was organised by APSCF within the project “Civil society for the right to education for all children in Moldova”, with the financial support provided by OXFAM Ibis.