School study topics not useful in the real world, says Prime Minister

Regional governments create fields of study at secondary schools whose students are unable to find a place on the labour market, thus they're wasting public finances, Prime Minister Robert Fico (Smer-SD) told a conference dealing with the Slovak labour market in Bratislava on Tuesday. Some 30,000 secondary school-leavers annually join the labour market, with as many as 63 percent of them finding jobs in fields for which they haven't studied. The figure is 57 percent for university graduates. "It's extremely important that the structure of vocational education matches the way in which the structure of jobs develops," stressed Fico. According to him, regional governments create fields of study at secondary vocational schools that don't allow students to find a job, such as leisure-time animators, promotional graphic designers and restorers. Prognoses show that employers in the engineering industry will have the biggest problems in finding suitable labour, stated the prime minister. "I view this attitude as a culpable waste of public finances," said Fico, adding that school-leavers taking up a job in a field for which they haven't studied have to be requalified, and the state is spending additional money in this way. "The state spends some €250 million annually on the studies of young people who are then unable to find a job," he said. Fico sees a need for higher centralisation and harmonisation among regional governments in some fields. "We need to strengthen the influence of regional vocational education councils - comprised of representatives of employers and labour offices - over the decision-making of regional governments regarding the structure of secondary and vocational schools," he said, adding there's also a need to decide on student numbers for individual fields of study.