Luanda - More than 100,000 new classrooms are available across the country for the 2024/2025 academic year, the Minister of Education, Luísa Grilo, announced Thursday.
According to the minister, who was speaking to the press on the sidelines of a meeting with the directors of education offices across the country, this number of classrooms will allow more than one million new students to enter the education system.
Figures show that 8,933,125 pupils attended school in the 2023/2024 academic year, 1.560 of them for the first time.
The sector had 103,216 more classrooms nationwide, an increase of 2,995 compared to the previous school year in public and public-private education.
According to Luísa Grilo, the 2024/2025 school year will officially open on the 30th of this month in Uíge province.
For this school year, she explained, it will not yet be possible to introduce national languages because the materials are not yet sufficient to fulfil the ministry's ambitions.
"This school year we won't be introducing national languages because the material we have isn't enough yet, but the challenge is to keep checking with our partners so that next year it will be possible," she said.
With regard to foreign languages, Luísa Grilo made it known that schools in the public education subsystem will be teaching French to fifth graders for the first-time next school year.
According to the government official, the measure is aimed at teaching foreign languages to children. She emphasised that the basic law imposes the teaching of French and English, which is already practised in public schools, but continued that the government had decided to do so in public institutions, taking into account the existence of many French-speaking children in Angola.
With regard to the population census, Luísa Grilo explained that it would not disrupt classes because the teachers involved would be duly replaced by trainee teachers from the country's magisterium. LIN/PA/DAN/DOJ
