The 8th Education International (EI) World Congress, meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, from 21st to 26th July 2019:
(1) Morocco is currently witnessing discontentment and the public’s increasing social frustration in the face of the Government’s overarching neoliberal policies, which are increasingly escaping its responsibility to ensure the right of access to public services and in particular the right to education. The education and training sector is suffering as a result of a set of measures, laws and agreements aimed at supporting the private sector in various forms: the rate of participation in private school education is currently around 20%, while primary education is still absent from the Government’s vision.
(2) Regarding higher education, the private sector lobby has been able to get a number of laws passed that facilitate and encourage investment in this type of teaching and has made it possible to provide direct financial support to a certain number of private universities, which constitutes one of the seriously destructive laws which hamper public education and which aim to privatize it, turning it into a banal commercial and marketable product.
(3) Consequently, the Government is resorting to direct contracting under the pretext of flexibility, which hits teaching quality hard in the absence of educational training, and threatens the psychological, social and legal stability of the job while also affecting the exercising of trade union rights.
(4) All of these projects fall within the ambit of subordination to the international financial institutions and in particular the International Monetary Fund (IMF), while the Moroccan Government fails to comply with the national and international pacts and treaties that it has ratified with regard to education and human rights.
(5) As education unions, SNE-CDT, SNE-FDT and SNESUP, are in the front line against this systematic and unprecedented attack against the free provision of teaching and the Government’s enactment of laws aimed at promoting and privatising education. The unions are part of an international campaign against the commercialisation and privatisation of education.
(6) To this effect, the 8th EI World Congress, meeting in Bangkok from 21 to 26 July 2019, demands that the Moroccan government:
(i) ensure every Moroccan has access to free quality public education as a human right and in full compliance with the government’s obligations to achieve the fourth Sustainable Development Goal SDG4;
(ii) restore the status of workers in the sector by improving their physical, social and professional conditions;
(iii) abandon the system of contract-based recruitment in this strategic sector;
(iv) cease its involvement in and support for the “Education Outcomes Fund” (EOF) project.