Ministry of Public Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan and the Uzbek Agency for Press and Information held a press conference at the National Press Center, dedicated to providing educational institutions with teaching literature and broad introduction of information and communication and educational technologies to the educational process.

Minister of Public Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan U.Inoyatov , general director of the Uzbek Agency for Press and Information O.Yunusov and others noted that wide-ranging reforms in the education system, conducted under the leadership of President Islam Karimov, serve to bring up highly spiritual, harmoniously developed young people with independent thinking. The system of public education comprises 15730 educational institutions. Education is carried out in Uzbek, Karakalpak, Russian , Kazakh, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Turkmen languages. 22,533,772 copies of textbooks and teaching aid materials in 392 titles have been printed and delivered to schools for the 1 -, 4 -, 6 -, 7 th grade pupils for 2013-14 academic year. Electronic versions of all textbooks are available on the website of the Ministry of Public Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan. In addition, for the 1st grade pupils «Kids\' English» textbook is published in 446,084 copies in Uzbek and in 59,974 copies in Russian .

28 secondary schools are chosen as pilot sites to develop a mechanism of implementation of the modern educational technologies in educational process. In March 23-27 this year the third phase of the republican subject Olympiads among students in secondary specialized educational institutions and secondary schools was held in the Republic of Karakalpakstan, regions and Tashkent city. The regional stage of the Olympiad was attended by 6979 students of secondary schools , 878 of them were winners.

According to the monitoring results, conducted in the 2012-2013 academic year, the quality of teaching in 9 subjects is of the highest level in Bukhara, Navoi and Khorezm regions and Tashkent city. In 2011-2012 special training courses were organized for secondary school teachers in order to improve the efficiency of the use of modern information and communication technologies.

In accordance with the requirements of state educational standards highly efficient multimedia and computer- electronic versions of textbooks for secondary schools are being developed. To date over three hundred electronic information and educational resources have been created and posted on the ministry\'s website

(Source: Uzbekistan National Agency – UzA)