Renowned lawyer Zhangeldy Suleymanov represents the group of plaintiffs. The applicants have a total of 29 claims against the department, including the cancellation of extending the academic year from 34 to 36 weeks (rather than postponing it to a later date due to the unpreparedness of the education system) and the physical burden on schoolchildren who have to carry 5-6-kilogram backpacks.

The situation in the secondary education system has actually become quite paradoxical. Mr. Suleymanov periodically draws attention to this.

Lifehack for dealing with illegality

Let’s consider the example of school shifts. In Kazakhstan, all educational processes are governed by the Law «On Education.» However, it does not state that it is permissible to have education in 2 or even 3 shifts in schools. Until 2021, even two-shift itineraries were not officially legal.

Sanitary and epidemiological requirements for educational facilities, as stipulated in point 13, state that «Two-shift education is allowed provided that the norm of space per student and the requirements of these Sanitary Rules are observed in each shift”, which rules were adopted on August 6, 2021.

Three-shift itinerary is completely illegal, but in the 2021-2022 academic year in Kazakhstan, there were 169 three-shift schools (2% of the total), which is 9 more than in the previous year, although the government promised to completely eliminate the issue of three-shift education in Kazakhstan by 2025.

«Worse than Africa. As of today, in the Ili district of Almaty region, children from 19 schools are being educated in three shifts, and in some classes, there are three children sitting at one desk! Ten years ago, I wrote many times that the second shift is illegal, but the Ministry of Education introduced it into the Sanitation Regulations for Education and sort of legalized it. That’s how they decided on the illegality of the second shift. In the normal world, there is no second shift because children can only learn properly in the first shift. But here, in 19 schools, it’s not even the second, but the third shift. I consider this a crime against children. And no official in Kazakhstan can sleep peacefully while children suffer from such education,» wrote Zhangeldy Suleimanov on his Facebook page.

The pace of putting new schools into operation in the country is not keeping up with demographic growth, and the officials in Astana have known this for a long time. However, the last Minister of Education and Science, Asqat Aimagambetov, for some reason, in 2020, reassured the public with a statement that the country was in pursuit of a task to come to single-shift schools. This is despite government forecasts indicating that by 2026, there will be a deficit of 1,117,000 student places across the country.

Dramatic Reality

Despite the visibly disadvantaged situation, a quarter of all schools in the country operate in a single shift. And since the law on education guarantees every Kazakhstani citizen ‘equality of rights to receive a quality education,’ dividing students into shifts is inherently illegal. The national project ‘Quality Education for All — Educated Nation’ until 2025 guaranteed that by 2025, the construction of 1000 schools would significantly improve the lives of the majority of students.

However, this national project was deemed outdated in 2023, and instead, the Concept for the Development of Preschool, Secondary, Technical, and Vocational Education for 2023-2029 was approved. There is no mention at all about a complete transition to the single-shift education there. This means that the government machinery in the new Kazakhstan operates on old principles: replacing one strategic document with another, abandoning previously set objectives.

In 2022, the former Vice Minister of Education and Science, Murat Abenov, gave an interview to the media where he compared incomparable entities — model Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS) with 7,500 regular schools. Interestingly, the ‘Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools’ were established in 2008 with the goal of testing advanced teaching methods and transferring the obtained results to the entire country. Fifteen years have passed, and the NIS continue to exist in their own elite sphere.

‘In order for all 8,000 schools to operate on a single shift, we need to build at least 5,000 modern schools additionally. This means we need to recruit new teaching and staff positions. When I was the Vice Minister of Education in 2012-2013, we considered the option of transferring part of the educational process to the summer months. We met with experts, scientists, and experienced education organization leaders.

And I remember how one of the elders said: How do you want to change things, like in Western countries with the ‘Cambridge’ program, when more than half of our schools don’t even have civilized toilets, but they have outdoor shacks with holes in the ground

“Most schools in the country do not have central heating and sewage systems. Since then, the situation has not changed significantly. Over these years, about 20-25 expensive showcase schools were built from the budget. Maintaining them consumes a significant portion of the budget. There was not enough for the rest. The money went to light rail transit (LRT) and Expo. Now the situation has become even more complicated — the demographic explosion has led to overcrowded schools. In Shymkent alone, we need to build 100 schools a year, and in Astana — 20. We need to manage to create minimal conditions. Therefore, we need to be realistic. Serious changes will take at least up to 10 years. Even then, if we recover what the oligarchs have stolen and allocate it all to the education sector, it might take at least 5 years,» believes Murat Abenov.

Unequal Rights From Childhood

Vasily Shakhgulary, a Ph.D. and UNESCO expert, has repeatedly explained the differences between learning in the first and second shifts.

Learning in the morning and after lunch is not the same for a child. From a psychological point of view, a person and their brain wake up around 9 a.m. For example, when a child goes to school at 8 a.m., the first lesson involves the process of waking up, and they only start thinking faster and better from the second lesson. From 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. is the time when the sun directly affects the child’s head. During this period, a child cannot think well. When we send them to study at 2 p.m., they fall into this slump — the brain is resting, and we burden it with subjects that require intensive brain activity. The whole world, I mean advanced countries, only have one shift of schooling. The first shift covers core subjects, and in the second shift, those who want, may engage in enriching activities like clubs, sections, and so on,

noted the expert.

If it weren’t for massive embezzlements in state procurement during school construction, all children in Kazakhstan could have been comfortably studying in a single shift long ago, rather than three shifts as it is now. Globalnews.kz recently published several articles on this topic.

Analysts from the public association ‘Digital Society,’ Nurgali Rakhmanov and Dinara Kanibay, calculated at the end of 2022 how much one student seat, constructed under non-transparent state procurement conditions, costs Kazakh taxpayers.

‘In all regions without exception, student seats did not cost the same. The least expensive in 2021, funded by the budget, were built for 1.7 million in Taldykorgan, and the most expensive ones were constructed for 14.5 million in Shymkent. In the first nine months of 2022, the story of misappropriating public funds for school construction remained the same. There were modest projects costing 1.4 million tenge per student seat in the Mangystau During that time, then-Deputy Prime Minister Eraly Tugzhanov noted that a unified school standard was being developed based on the number of student seats.

There were cases where each region developed project cost estimates (PSE), resulting in different costs. In one country, there were different prices for a school with the same number of student seats. Now we are working on a unified standard for the entire Kazakhstan. Unified standards will be developed for schools with capacities ranging from 300 to 2500 student seats across the country. The work on the project has already started at the Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development,

said Tugzhanov in August 2022.

Later, they launched the ‘Comfortable School’ project, and the most honest and transparent fund in the country, ‘Samruk-Kazyna,’ was appointed as the sole operator of this significant construction project worth 2.6 trillion tenge. By 2025, with this money, we expect to see 401 new schools accommodating 842 thousand seats. Hopefully, the project will not be canceled in 2024, like the previous ones, due to its impracticality. Then, the transition of Kazakhstani schoolchildren to a normal single-shift education with extracurricular development opportunities will be postponed indefinitely once again.