Country Readiness Assessment Report – Kyrgyzstan 4. Characteristics of the Country’s Human Resources High schools The majority of high schools are governmental, the largest sector in the country. Currently, there are 1,680,000 children under the age of 14 years in Kyrgyzstan. In the school year 1999 to 2000, 1,100,000 pupils were studying in the country’s 1,980 schools. The High School education system prescribes an “Informatics and Information Technologies” programme for all state and private high schools. The programme is sub-divided into two stages: • • First stage (8 – 9 grades) – basic course on informatics. 102 hours in classes. Second stage (10 – 11 grades) –study of informatics in subjects that can be selected. In accordance with the specialisation of the school, the course may take from 68 to 136 class hours. It should be noted, however, that programmes in informatics do not satisfy modern requirements. Most of them are oriented towards programming languages but not the use of general information technologies. Due to lack of teaching time as well as of computers, students are neither obtaining real programming skills, nor are they gaining sufficient understanding of information technologies in general. In 1995/96, two national educational programmes “Professionals of the 21st century” and “Bilim” were adopted. The first programme stands for development of international cooperation in the field of science and education, encouraging modern technologies. The second program is devoted to the development of overall strategy in the educational sector with emphasis in the following aspects: • preservation of the availability of education; • increase of quality and efficiency of education; • improvement of financing of education; and • development of legislature in the educational field. Recently, the Asian Development Bank has begun financing of two projects, “Information management system in education” and “Distant training system for high school teachers”. Table 1. Computers in high schools (year 2000) Provinces Number schools 1. Bishkek city 2. Batken province 3.Jalal-Abad province 4.Osh province 5.Issyk-Kul province 6. Naryn province 7.Chuy province 8.Talas province TOTAL 119 188 410 518 190 138 310 107 1980 of Number students 97218 95580 212409 265128 93422 64072 148753 49570 1025792 31 of IBM compatible computers 659 107 493 525 545 228 367 195 3119 Students per computer 148 893 430 505 171 281 405 254 329