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Zagreb - The Croatian parliament on Friday adopted amendments to the Education Act, setting out the purpose, goals, structure and method of adopting documents relating to the curricular reform, and providing for a 30% increase in wages for teachers involved in EU projects being implemented in schools.
The amendments were carried by a vote of 68 to 26, with 29 abstentions. All the amendments put forward by the opposition were rejected, as were proposals by the Bridge party and the SDP for a third reading.
The new law includes an amendment proposed by the ruling HDZ and HNS parties that ensures equal treatment in hiring of people who completed a relevant university programme and teachers who graduated from teacher-training colleges with extra courses in specific subjects.
This provision had caused disputes in the ruling coalition. The parliamentary group of the HDS, HSLS and HDSSB parties demanded that teachers who had studied a specific subject should be given preference in being hired as subject teachers, followed by teachers who had graduated from teacher-training colleges with extra courses in specific subjects, while teachers with an engineer's degree with extra courses in teaching-related subjects should be the last in the order of hiring.
The parliamentary group of the Work and Solidarity Party, Reformists and independent deputies called for the disputed provision to remain unchanged because it had not been put to public consultation and had been included in the bill between two readings in parliament.