Author: Institute of Foreign Credential Services

The Central Asian nation announced one of the most significant education reforms in its history, changing everything from how long students stay in school to how they demonstrate readiness for university. On September 9, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev chaired a meeting that revealed a complete restructuring of the education system, and the implications are massive for anyone dealing with Uzbek credentials now or in the future.

The headline change is straightforward but significant: Uzbekistan is moving from an 11-year to a 12-year general education system. This isn’t just adding an extra year for the sake of it. Former Deputy Minister of Preschool and School Education Sardor Rajabov, who now serves as First Deputy Minister of Higher Education, explained that this aligns Uzbekistan with international standards. According to PISA 2022 data, 85% of high-performing countries around the world use 12-year school systems. By making this shift, Uzbekistan is essentially ensuring that its graduates will be on equal footing with students from countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and most of Europe when it comes to credential recognition and university admissions abroad.

Here’s how the new system breaks down. The preparatory year for six-year-old children, which used to exist separately, is now being folded directly into primary education. So instead of thinking of it as “preschool plus elementary school,” it’s all one continuous journey: one preparatory year plus four years of primary education, then five years of basic general secondary education covering grades five through nine, and finally two years of complete general secondary education that students can complete at traditional schools, academic lyceums, military schools, or technical colleges. The government isn’t just reorganizing the existing system either. They’re planning to build 3,600 new schools and establish over 1,000 state preschools across the country specifically to support this new structure. While the specific implementation timeline hasn’t been announced, the infrastructure investment signals a serious commitment to this transition.

But the changes extend well beyond the 12-year structure. President Mirziyoyev announced a major shift in vocational education that will fundamentally alter the path many young Uzbeks take after ninth grade. He declared the coming year as the “Year of Vocational Training for Youth” and gave regional governors a clear mandate: at least 50% of ninth-grade graduates need to enrol in technical colleges next year. Right now, the numbers tell a different story. This year, only 182,000 out of 608,000 ninth-grade graduates entered technical colleges, even though the country has 598 technical colleges with a capacity for 450,000 students. That’s a utilization rate of barely 30% when the infrastructure could handle much more. The president didn’t mince words, calling this untapped capacity an “enormous resource, opportunity, and potential for our youth” that’s being wasted.

To make vocational training more attractive and effective, Uzbekistan is partnering with China to import expertise. Each region will get two “Uzbekistan-China Workshops” and more than 100 Chinese specialists are being invited to teach. A brand new Vocational Education Agency is being created specifically to coordinate this push, and officials have until the end of the year to develop modern occupational standards for various industries. For students and their families trying to figure out whether a technical college credential will be respected, this massive investment suggests these qualifications are about to carry a lot more weight.

Now let’s talk about testing, because this change could save students and parents an enormous amount of stress and money. Currently, Uzbek students have to navigate three completely separate examinations: one to graduate from school, another to get into university, and a third for subject certification. It’s redundant, expensive, and time-consuming. Officials are now proposing to consolidate all three into a single Unified State Examination that would be internationally accredited. If this goes through, students take one test instead of three, parents pay for one testing cycle instead of three, and universities get a standardized measure of student readiness. The government tried to implement something similar to Russia’s Unified State Examination system before, but it never quite happened. This time, with international accreditation on the table, there’s reason to believe they’re serious about following through.

Teachers are seeing real changes too, and this matters because teacher quality directly impacts the value of the education students receive. President Mirziyoyev claimed during the meeting that his promise to raise teacher salaries to one thousand dollars has become reality, achieved in just three years. More than 60,000 teachers who actively work on professional development now earn 10 to 12 million soums monthly, which translates to roughly that thousand-dollar mark. School principals and kindergarten directors are now pulling in over 10 million soums as well. Among 1,500 schools that adopted new evaluation systems, 300 showed strong results and their entire staff received bonuses up to 40%. When teachers are paid better and have incentives to improve, students benefit, and the credentials those students earn become more valuable.

Even kindergarten is getting an upgrade. While 118,000 kindergarten teachers went through professional training this summer, officials admitted it’s not enough. Pedagogical universities are introducing a “1+5” bachelor’s program where teachers with secondary specialized education can study one day per week while working the other five days. This will produce about 10,000 new university-educated kindergarten specialists every year. Starting next year, each region will have “New Generation” kindergartens that serve as model institutions to help improve teaching quality across both public and private facilities.

One entirely new element entering the system is the school counsellor position. These aren’t guidance counsellors in the American sense. Uzbek school counsellors will organize extracurricular clubs in languages, vocational training, engineering, creative arts, and sports based on what students are actually interested in. They’ll earn the same as deputy principals, and if they hold management certificates, they get an extra 30% monthly bonus. They’ll also manage a new digital portfolio system called erp.portfolio that tracks student achievements and participation. Starting in the 2028-2029 academic year, the information in these portfolios will be included on school certificates, meaning student credentials will reflect more than just grades and test scores. For anyone navigating Uzbek education credentials right now or planning to in the future, these changes represent a fundamental shift toward international standards, greater investment in teacher quality, and more comprehensive documentation of student achievement.