On 29 April 2015, at the Parliament of Georgia, the United National Movement MP, Sergo Ratiani, talked about suspended students. According to him, every six months for the last two years he addressed the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia and received information about suspended students. According to Mr Ratiani, the number of suspended students illustrated a catastrophic situation. However, two full pages of the most recent answer he received from the Ministry in regard to his last request for this information were dedicated to the explanation of how the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia can no longer calculate the number of suspended students. According to Mr Ratiani’s assessment, this indicates the ineffectiveness and incapacity of the government.

took interest in the accuracy of Sergo Ratiani’s statement and verified it.

about suspended students earlier as well. A total of 28,055 students had been suspended as of 1 October 2013. Of this number, 8,309 were suspended due to not paying their tuition fee. The overall number of suspended students was 33,575 as of 1 January 2014. Of these, 11,685 were suspended due to not paying their tuition fee. According to the 30 October 2014 answer from the National Centre of Educational Quality Enhancement, it was no longer possible to show the entire number of suspended students due to technical errors discovered in the Centre’s registry of educational facilities. Hence, we were unable to receive the information in which we were interested.

We addressed the National Centre of Educational Quality Enhancement with a similar request on 30 April 2015 as well. The answer we received says that the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia is carrying out work on improving the registry containing the information about suspended students which means that it is impossible to process these data at the moment.

As we have seen, the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia has been carrying out work on improving the registry containing the information about suspended students for seven months already which is why the information about suspended students is, indeed, no longer available.