All pre-school students to be given free meals: Minister

ANKARA

All pre-school students will be given free meals, Education Minister Mahmut Özer has announced, noting that the ministry’s most important agenda is to increase the number of students provided with free meals from 1.8 to 4 million.

“If there were no investments in education in the last 20 years, the Republic of Türkiye would have missed education in its first century,” Özer said, noting that the ministry made all investments with a “quality-oriented” plan.

Emphasizing that the ministry’s most important agenda item today is to increase the number of students offered free meals from 1.8 million to 4 million in 2023, Özer said all pre-school students will be given free meals.

The ministry has allocated an investment budget of 525 billion Turkish Liras for the social policies it has implemented for equal opportunities in education, he stressed.

Özer also pointed out that the schooling rate at the age of 5 has increased from 11 percent to 99 percent, while it is 99.63 percent in primary school and 99.44 percent in secondary school.

“However, the most important thing is that the schooling rate in secondary education, which was 44 percent, has increased to 95 percent.”