Science and Education Minister Radovan Fuchs said on Wednesday that schools would remain decentralised in relation to new general restrictions to be adopted by the government on Thursday.

Speaking to the press after an inner cabinet meeting, Fuchs said that the meeting concluded that face-to-face classes were very important and a priority, adding that the situation would continue to be assessed together with local coronavirus response teams.

The minister mentioned the situation in the northern city of Varazdin where secondary schools switched to online classes after restaurant and cafes were ordered to shut down. He said that it was being assessed whether a combination of online and in-person classes was better than the whole country switching to online classes.

As for universities, Fuchs said that 70 percent of classes were conducted online, but that it should be taken into consideration that there were courses of study that could not be conducted online, such as those concerning biomedicine.

The minister said that a full transition to online classes would cause multiple damage not just to education, but also to the mental, sociological and other aspects of children’s development. He cited a UNESCO study recommending that face-to-face classes be held as much as possible because of the negative impact of remote learning on children.

He pointed out that schools were still not hotspots of coronavirus infection.

Asked to comment on today’s protest by teachers, Fuchs said he did not fully understand their protest because the government had honoured all that was agreed, including a 4% pay rise as of January 1.

The press remarked that the teachers warned that they were not being paid for teaching children in self-isolation, that teachers in self-isolation were getting reduced pay, and that school heads were refusing to allow self-isolating teachers to teach online.

Fuchs said that the work of self-isolating teachers was decided by school heads. If the entire class is in self-isolation, the teacher gets full pay, and if the teacher is in self-isolation, they certainly do not get their pay reduced by a third or a quarter but by a few hundred kuna, he added.