New legislation to curb Roma segregation in schools

The Czech Education Ministry has come up with new legislation that should curb the practice of placing disproportionately high number of Roma children in special schools, the news website idnes.cz reported on Sunday. The Czech Republic has been consistently criticized for including many Roma children into programmes for children with light mental disabilities. The new legislation will oblige school directors to report the number of pupils in such programmes, a statistics that is now not available. The ministry also wants to increase control over institutions diagnosing schoolchildren, and introduce standards to make sure only mentally disabled children are included in the programmes. The new legislation should come into force in July.