In the 358 public education and vocational training institutions operated by the Hungarian Catholic Church, nearly 150,000 students and 14,500 teachers have started the 2023/2024 school year as planned.
Most Catholic education and training institutions are multi-purpose facilities. In many places, education is provided from kindergarten to secondary school. The 358 Catholic institutions consist of 771 units.
In the 2023/2024 school year, five new schools are added to the list of Catholic institutions, which have recently been taken over by the Hungarian Catholic Church. Two other institutions have expanded their range of activities with a kindergarten and a primary school.
This academic year, the Catholic Pedagogical Institute (KaPI) will continue to pay great attention to supporting high quality teaching, with a special focus on caring for the created world and child protection.
Child protection:
• From this school year on, the teachers of Catholic public education institutions will have the opportunity to participate in a 60-hour training programme on child protection over the course of the academic year;
• Not only individual teachers but also the entire teaching staff can apply for training and/or professional days focusing on key issues such as addiction, case discussion, prevention of victimisation and perpetration, or internet safety;
• The Catholic Pedagogical Institute invites teachers to online workshops on ten key topics: health promotion, emotional intelligence, equal opportunities, addictions, aggression, challenges of the online world, suicide and self-harm, family life education, sexual abuse, crime prevention.
In addition to child protection, caring for the created world will also be a priority in the coming school year. In this area, the Catholic Pedagogical Institute and Pázmány Péter Catholic University will launch a three-year joint project this September. The basis for joint reflection is Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, Laudato Si.
From now on, KaPI’s three rural training centres in Pécs, Szombathely and Miskolc will also support teachers in Catholic educational institutions.
It is a great pleasure for us that pupils in grades 9-12 can learn literature, grammar and history from the volumes of the Saint Emeric textbook family this school year again.
KaPI also thought of children in kindergartens, so they published a collection of kindergarten songs called “The Bells are Ringing” for this school year, which was distributed to all Catholic kindergarten groups.
Budapest, 12 September 2023
General secretariat of the HCBC