State built €145 million worth of new state secondary schools in five years

The state built 13 new state secondary schools at a cost of €145 million over the past five years. While education financing debates have questioned the rationality of pouring so much money into concrete, the education ministry believes it was necessary.
Over the past five years, the state has built state secondary schools in Kohtla-Järve, Paide, Rakvere, Narva, Narva Eesti, Tabasalu, Saaremaa, Rae, Saue and Viimsi, as well as the Tallinn Music and Ballet School (MUBA), Tallinn Pelgulinna and Mustamäe state secondary schools.
The most expensive projects were the new MUBA building, which cost €33.4 million, and the Pelgulinna State High School, which cost €21.7 million. Rae, Mustamäe, and Narva state high schools are also on the pricier side of the spectrum, with building expenses ranging from €12 to 13 million. Design and interior expenditures, taxes, and other expenses must be factored into these figures.
During the teachers' strike in January, Education Minister Kristina Kallas (Eesti 200) said that a political agreement should be made to decide whether to stop building new school buildings and instead use the funds to boost teachers' pay.
"We have built a lot of new buildings in education in recent years, at the expense of which it has been a problem to raise teachers' salaries," Kallas said at the time.

However, the Ministry of Education does not consider the amount of money spent on the construction of state secondary schools to be unreasonable. Henry Kattago, undersecretary for the Ministry of Education and Research, said that EU grants and government co-financing were used to build these schools.
"In the case of the construction of state high schools, the majority of the funds were European Union subsidies that could not have been used for any other purpose because, according to the partnership agreement signed with the European Commission and the agreed-upon Operational Program, these subsidies could only be used for school-related investments. In addition to EU grants, there is a national co-financing based on the award criteria," he said.
Kattago said that the construction of new buildings was linked to the reorganization of the school network and the goal of reducing space in areas with shrinking populations. "The European Union's support is an additional external funding to the state budget, which has made it possible to build new state school buildings as part of the reorganization of the school network," he said.

He referred to a report commissioned last year by the Foresight Center, a think tank at the Estonian parliament, on "Efficiency of schools and the school network," which found that inefficiencies in the school network exacerbate the shortage of teachers: many of today's schools are located in so-called "empty wards," and half-empty classes tie up more teachers than needed.
"This often means a situation where a teacher has to work in several schools at the same time in order to have a full-time job and an income," he said, adding that the creation of state schools has made it possible to set optimal class sizes, often with several parallels. "This means that a subject teacher can teach full time in one school and not have to split his or her salary between several schools."
He said that the same outcome should be accomplished at municipal secondary schools. According to the spatial analysis of the school network, due to demographic changes, nearly half of Estonia's schools are located in places where fewer than 90 primary school-aged children live within a 25-minute commute. However, these 50 or so schools employ 412 teachers, with an average of six students per teacher.
However, if the school network would shrink, it raises the question of where those pupils will live, if a secondary school near their home is closed and their daily travel to school becomes too long. The Ministry of Education has no specific plans for boarding houses.

"In order to create boarding places, it is first necessary to agree with the local authorities that a boarding place will address their concerns. Until then, it is impossible to estimate how much it will cost," Kattago said.
It is worth making the most of the existing network of boarding schools, he said.
"The dormitory at Rakvere Vocational School was also completed within the last five years. It additionally accommodates pupils from the nearby state high school," Kattago said.
According to an audit by the National Audit Office last year, the number of secondary schools in Estonia has decreased by about a third over the past decade: in the school year 2009/2010 there were 226 secondary schools, while in the year 2020/2021 there will be 158, or 68 fewer. At the same time, the number of state upper secondary schools has increased.
The state is required to maintain at least one state secondary school in each county, according to the Basic and Secondary Schools Act adopted in 2013.
The structure of the Estonian education system is outlined below; state high schools only provide general upper secondary education (years 16-18), whereas municipal high schools (which are also referred to as high schools) typically provide both basic and upper secondary education in the same structure (years 7-18).
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Editor: Kristina Kersa