Lithuanian Education, Science and Sport Minister Gintautas Jakštas is asking Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė to accept his resignation, he announced at a press conference on Tuesday.
Earlier, Jakštas announced that on Monday he accepted the resignation request of Deputy Education Minister Ramūnas Skaudžius
“Yesterday, I accepted the resignation of Deputy Minister Ramūnas Skaudžius, who has been responsible for the model of intermediary exams and their implementation from the very beginning,” Jakštas told a press conference on Tuesday.
The intermediary exams, which are part of the graduation exams, are taken by eleventh graders in Lithuania. This is the first year they have been held, and the points scored count towards the final results of the graduation exams.
However, the implementation of intermediary examination has been plagued by a number of setbacks and technical issues. The commissions set up by Jakštas also acknowledged that not all the tasks were prepared properly.
According to Jakštas, the intermediary exams were implemented to make learning more coherent. However, he admitted that significant shortcomings have emerged in the process.
“The responsibility for this lies with the Education Ministry and the National Agency for Education,” he said.
Jakštas also noted he was not satisfied with the working culture of Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė’s team in solving problems in the education area.
“From the communication with the prime minister’s team in recent days, we can see that we do not have enough freedom to decide and implement the solutions we believe in,” he said. “I have already had to take responsibility for decisions I did not make several times, and I do not want to do that again.”
Asked whether she would accept Jakštas’ resignation request, Šimonytė said on Tuesday, “If the minister feels that he has already done everything he could, then this is probably how the situation should be assessed”.
It was also reported that Šimonytė was going to meet Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda over the education minister’s resignation in the near future.
Later on Tuesday, the Education Ministry announced that this year’s intermediary examination session will be declared a pilot session. This means that the results of exams that have already taken place will be counted towards the final graduation exam score only if current eleventh graders wish so. The second session of intermediary exams for math and the Lithuanian language, which were scheduled for the 12th grade, will not take place.
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