The Ministry of Education and Science, in close cooperation with various agencies, continues to work actively to identify adolescents left out of school and to include them in the education system.
According to the latest data, as a result of intensive work of social workers with beneficiaries, comparison of databases of different agencies and elimination of inconsistencies, as well as data on the first and second stages of first-year registration, the number of out-of-school students has decreased to 6,885.
Importantly, more than 1,000 children have already registered and will join the learning process from September. In addition, the significant reduction in data was due to the settlement of registration problems with foreigners, as well as the identification of children born abroad who are still Georgian citizens.
Based on the analysis of the data obtained in the III (universal) and IV stages of first-grader registration, it is expected that the data will be further reduced and will approach the real amount. In addition, the current picture will be changed by the intensive work of social workers, whose goal is to involve adults in formal education.
The aim of the Ministry of Education and Science is, first, to identify children whose right to education has been violated and to provide them with appropriate support, as well as to create a system that will enable state institutions to exchange information more flexibly and identify children who are 6 years old.
Preliminary results released in March identified 10,404 adolescents aged 6 to 16 years (1.7% of the population of appropriate age) who have no educational background and are not in the education management information system's student database. In the next stage, this figure was reduced to 9,200.
It is noteworthy that in our country there was no complete data on children left out of education so far, and there was no plan or mechanism to return them to the educational environment.