OREANDA-NEWS. Vladimir Putin met with teachers and students from the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.

The President said that he will meet with teachers and students from Russia’s all federal universities.

The Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University was established by the Presidential Executive Order of October 13, 2010.

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PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Good afternoon colleagues and friends.

As you know, raising the quality of education was an issue that got a lot of attention first during last year’s election campaign and then in the presidential executive orders and government executive decisions that followed. This attention continues now. The goal is to raise the standard of our education system and also to make it more innovative and more attuned to our country’s development demands and the labour market’s needs, to the specific requirements of each particular region.

For this reason, I will hold a series of meetings like today’s with students and teachers from the nine federal universities. We will use them as a base and start with these brief but hopefully substantive discussions. I would like to hear from you and your colleagues about what is happening in your regions and how you see the situation. You know our initial intentions. They included increasing the financial base for students, including for students in their first years of study. Raising teachers’ wages was another objective. The target there was to make pay for actual teaching work at least double the average wage in the region by 2018. We also set the goal of strengthening universities’ ties with schools on the one hand and with business and the economy on the other. As I said, the objective here is to make education more attuned to specific regional needs and the country’s development needs in general.

I do not want to make any long speeches. I want to hear what you have to say, hear from you whether you are seeing actual results yet? Are things going as you hoped, or have you yet to see results? I want to hear your concerns and your proposals in this regard. I hope that you will have proposals in any case. Let’s begin our discussion.