The government is “ready” to begin making moves towards the opening of a campus of the Cyprus University of Technology (Tepak) in Larnaca, Education Minister Athena Michaelidou said on Friday.
Speaking at an event in the town, she said the government had received a letter from Tepak regarding the potential opening of a campus there in a similar vein to that which opened in Paphos last year.
She added that President Nikos Christodoulides has “already expressed an interest” in such a campus being opened, and that a feasibility study has been prepared and submitted to the finance ministry.
“We are ready, pending the finance ministry’s decision to approve the budgets and procedures,” she said.
Asked whether this will be done before the end of the year, she said, “I imagine that this will be the goal,” and added that her ministry is “in communication with” the finance ministry to this end.
Outside of the world of universities, she said technical and vocational education is “important” to the government.
She said the government is “particularly interested” in the matter, not only at a basic level but also in terms of following the course of technical school graduates as they enter the world of work.
She said this “helps us, it gives us data on which we base our efforts to upgrade technical education more broadly”.
To this end, she said her ministry has now been working for over a year and a half to “modernise” technical schools’ syllabi and to improve their infrastructure, including through introducing “new technologies” and by making technical schools “more attractive”.
She also touched on the matter of school infrastructure in Larnaca, saying the town is “lagging behind mainly in terms of buildings”.
For this reason, she said, surveyors have “already started working” in many schools, and that she hopes schools in Larnaca will “soon change for the better”.
With this in mind, she was keen to point out the “excellent atmosphere” in Larnaca’s schools, extolling the virtues of the town’s “excellent teachers, leaders of the schools, something which I see in many schools.”
