The poor results of the Kosovo education system on the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, which assesses students internationally, became a central part of almost every discussion regarding the quality of education in Kosovo.

The PISA test measures 15 and 16-year-old students’ academic knowledge and the results for Kosovo’s education system are below the average of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Kosovo participated in the test in 2015 for the first time and the students’ results were third from the bottom. In 2018, they were only one place higher, coming in fourth from the bottom of the list. 

The PISA test, which is held every three years, was not held in 2021 due to the pandemic. Now the test will be held between July and September 2022. About 6,300 students will take this test from each of the 85 countries, including Kosovo. Results are expected to come out in December 2023.

The OECD, the organizer of PISA, in their latest Western Balkans multidimensional report, lists education reforms as one of the most urgent issues Kosovo’s institutions need to address. But key reforms in the education sector aimed at raising standards and getting better results on PISA have stalled. Two years of the pandemic shook education systems everywhere, especially in countries like Kosovo, where the education system was already seen as particularly poor.

On Tuesday April 19 a student protest with the slogan “Don’t feel like going to school” took place across 28 municipalities. Through this protest, the first of its kind, organized by the Kosovo Student Council (KSC), students demanded that the attention of institutions, teachers and parents be turned towards improving the quality of education.

Now, the government that came to power a year ago, faced with the immediate need to address the consequences of the pandemic not only for education but all sectors, says there is no hope for improvement on PISA.

New curriculum in older circumstances

On March 11, 2020, when cases of Covid were increasing around the world, Kosovo’s government decided to close schools as a preventive measure.

In those circumstances, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) together with other parties, organized distance learning which initially included showing video lessons on Kosovo’s public broadcaster for students in primary and lower secondary education. Secondary and higher education was left to the responsibility of municipalities, which used electronic platforms such as Zoom to hold classes.

The 2020-2021 school year started after numerous delays, which were followed by Covid prevention measures, such as social distancing, that required reducing the number of students in the classroom, measuring students’ temperature, wearing masks and other measures. During this period, MEST prepared a guide for organizing learning in pandemic conditions. It presented three scenarios depending on the Covid-risk level: scenario A, in-person learning, applicable when the risk is low; scenario B, partial return, combined in-person and distance learning when the risk is moderate; and scenario C, school closures and distance learning when the risk is high.

The focus on the management of the learning process during the pandemic necessitated forgoing the implementation of the new curriculum. One of the larger reforms in the primary education system since Kosovo’s declaration of independence, this curriculum aimed to fundamentally transform the classroom.

The new curriculum in pre-university education was approved in 2011, revised in March 2016 and planned to be implemented only two years later, in 2018.

The curriculum was structured to change education from being subject-based — focusing on increasing subject knowledge such as mathematics and grammar — to developing broader aptitude and skills. This framework aims to prepare Kosovo’s young people to face the challenges of the 21st century and to generate new competitive knowledge for the global labor market.

Although the implementation of this curriculum would significantly increase the quality of education in Kosovo, this process has been consistently criticized because it did not take limited infrastructure and human capital into account. Schools continue to lack libraries, laboratories and computers, while teaching continues being held in two shifts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The Kosovo Pedagogical Institute (PIK), an independent organization that provides professional services to MEST, conducted research in 2019 on the new curriculum’s implementation. According to them, the new curriculum was improperly implemented and schools “have remained alone in leading the implementation of the curriculum at the school level, without consolidated and continuous professional support.”

In the absence of a coordinating body, according to PIK, the main activities related to curricular reform are fragmented and uncoordinated by MEST. The fact that municipal education directorates (MED) lack the capacity to implement the new curriculum was raised by the OECD in a recent report, which stated that MEDs and schools need more resources to implement quality assurance processes in teaching.

One of the consequences of this lack of coordination is noticeable in the preparation of new textbooks, which is an essential part of the new curriculum. Petrit Tahiri, director of Kosovo Education Center (KEC), a non-governmental organization (NGO) dealing with education, says that the new curriculum’s implementation has been damaged by a lack of prior preparation.

For example, according to the new curriculum, teachers have the opportunity to select textbooks other than those selected by MEST if they believe that those textbooks would help meet the specific needs of their students.

“This is a very good thing that has happened for the first time in our country,” said Tahiri, but added that parents, teachers and students were not sufficiently informed about the process. As a result they were not prepared to choose their own textbooks.