MOSCOW, July 16 (Itar-Tass) —— Education and Science Minister Dmitry Livanov expects a new education law will be adopted in Russia before the end of this year or early next year.
“We expect the draft become law in December [2012] or in the first month of 2013,” Livanov said at a meeting of the Federation Council Committee on Science, Education, Culture and Information Policy on Monday, July 16.
The draft law is now being examined by the government and should be submitted to the State Duma before the end of July.
The new education law should support strong universities and impose strict control over weak ones, the Secretary-General of the Russian Union of Rectors, Olga Kashirina, said earlier.
“There are advanced universities and there are universities that lag behind. The former need to be stimulated to develop further, and put those that produce the ‘ballast’ under strict control,” she said.
According to Kashirina, the new law “should stimulate and consolidate positive experience” and “patch up legal loopholes”.
“It’s high time we put an end to administrative and command methods of management in the system of education. We want to overregulate everything and set enrollment target figures for universities while having no statistics and not even wishing to get them from employers,” Kashirina said.
Moscow State Law Academy Rector Viktor Blazheyev, who is one of the authors of the new law, said that on the whole “there are no questions about the law” as it is “easy to apply, it states general rules and contains general norms. But we have to improve the legal framework further because it is impossible for one document to cover all contingencies and for that reason follow-up regulator acts are unavoidable”.
The draft law on education is to be submitted to the State Duma in July. It will be debated by the federal government before that.