The data on education have been taken from the database of the Institute for Information on Education – a departmental workplace for education statistics under the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the CR. Tables 11-1. to 11-5. include all schools classified in the register of schools and school facilities regardless the founder. Tables 11-6. to 11-8. do not include data on the 2 state universities founded by the Ministry of Defence of the CR and Ministry of Interior of the CR. Teachers (including directors and their deputies, educational consultants and teachers of professional training) are given as full-time equivalent employees.

ISCED – the International Standard Classification of Education was compiled and issued by UNESCO as early as 1976 to be used as “a tool appropriate for collecting processing and disseminating education statistics in individual countries and on an international scale” The last revision of the classification was made in 1997. The classification uses 7 levels of education (0 to 6), which can be broken further to A to C.

Nursery schools provide pre-primary education. Data include both “common” nursery schools and also schools that are founded for children with special educational needs.

Basic schools, including schools for pupils with special educational needs, provide basic education, which is compulsory for all able children.

Secondary schools, including schools for pupils with special educational needs, are meant for obtaining secondary education. This type of education is provided at schools teaching in programmes of secondary general schools (grammar schools) and in programmes of vocational training at secondary schools (incl. programmes of secondary technical schools, secondary vocational schools, vocational schools and practical schools). Programmes of vocational training include also follow-up courses which are given separately.

Another type of schools are conservatories, including conservatories for pupils with health handicaps, where pupils can obtain either secondary education with maturita examination or conservatoire higher professional education. Higher professional education can students obtain higher professional schools.

Data on all the above-mentioned types of schools are given for school year and refer to 30 September of the respective year.

Universities offer bachelor, master, follow-up master and doctoral programmes. Because numbers of students studying simultaneously at more than one university or faculty have been increasing, the numbers of students refer to numbers of actual persons (each student is counted only once). The total number may differ from the sums for individual universities, forms of education or programme types.

Data on public and private universities are taken from the Union Information from Students’ Registers (Sdružené informace matrik studentů – SIMS). Numbers of schools and students refer to 31 December 2008 and numbers of graduates are given for calendar year. The central database is continually completed and updated; the data presented in this Statistical Yearbook refer to 9 February 2009.

Breakdown by form of study

• secondary education and higher professional education is full-time or may have other forms, i.e. evening classes, extramural, distance or combined education;
• universities offer programmes of full-time, distance or combined education.

CULTURE

Information on public libraries and historical monuments with cultural use are taken over from the National Information and Consulting Centre for Culture established by the Ministry of Culture of the CR. Data in the tables are either related to the end of year or they are annual aggregates.

Public libraries include the National Library of the CR and Moravian Library, which are subject to direct control of the Ministry of Culture of the CR, regional scientific libraries established by regional authorities and also libraries established by municipalities and towns. For all the types of libraries, the indicator “Loans, total” refers to loans of all librara stock units and other documents used in and outside the library. A library stock unit is each separate volume of a book, a complete volume or several issues of a periodical bound or inserted in a folder, each separate map, graphic sheet, record, etc. Other documents include, for instance, magnetic tapes, microfilm rolls, photocopies, microfiches and the like.

Historical monuments with a cultural use include castles, palaces, monasteries, ruins and other monuments that are made accessible to visitors for admission fees and do not come under the maintenance of a museum or a gallery. The shown data refer to all facilities, irrespective of their founder.

Other information is published on the web pages the departmental information system of the Ministry of Culture of the CR – National Information and Consulting Centre for Culture: www.nipos-mk.cz.

HEALTH

Selected data on health (the numbers of physicians and paramedical workers with professional qualifications and the number of health establishments, bed-strength and inpatients) are taken over from the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic (IHIS). The data cover both state and non-state sector.

There has been a change in the definition of the category paramedical workers in connection with the passing of Act No. 95/2004 Coll. and 96/2004 Coll. The previously observed category of professional health personnel with secondary education (IHIS) was replaced by the category of health-personnel qualified for carrying out health profession with no professional supervision after obtaining professional qualification (shortly paramedical workers with professional qualifications).

Physicians, incl. stomatologists (f/t equivalent) - the sum of work loads of individual workers of the health establishments converted according to the full number of working hours per week laid down for a given establishment or workplace; as from 2007 physicians (plus stomatologists) are including contractual workers.

Contract workers are workers working in a specific health establishment on the basis of the following:

• contract for work other than contract of employment (employees working on the basis of contract on services, employees working on the basis of contract for work)
• contract for work (under the Civil Code or Commercial Code)

Data on incapacity for work due to disease or injury are processed by the CZSO. The reporting duty is imposed on all businesses, which fulfil duties concerning sickness insurance independently, and district social security administrations, which submit aggregates for entities that do not settle sickness insurance claims on their own.

Average percentage of incapacity for work is calculated as the ratio of the number of calendar days of incapacity for work due to disease or injury to the average number of the sickness insured, multiplied by the number of calendar days.

More detailed information on the health service in the Czech Republic is available in the book “Czech Health Statistics Yearbook” (Czech-English), regional health statistics yearbooks, and monothematic publications of the ”Health Statistics” series the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the CR (IHIS CR) puts out for the Czech Republic and Czech regions every year. More detailed information on the publications and information released are available on the IHIS CR’s website www.uzis.cz.

SOCIAL SECURITY

The social security scheme includes pension insurance, sickness insurance, state social support benefits, and social care.

The pension insurance scheme provides security for old age, in the event of disability or death of the breadwinner. Provided within this scheme are old-age, disability (full and partial), widows’, widowers’, and orphans’ pensions.

The sickness insurance system of benefits comprises four benefits, namely sickness benefit, financial support for care of a family member, maternity benefit, and pregnancy and maternity compensation benefit. Sickness insurance benefits are provided per calendar day of a given period of time. Sickness insurance of the self-employed is voluntary. Self-employed persons are entitled to two of the benefits – the sickness benefit and the maternity benefit. Job applicants are not sickness insured, but they are paid the maternity benefit from sickness insurance.

Characteristics of sickness insurance benefits:

• sickness benefit – paid in the case of incapacity for work due to illness or injury or if quarantine is imposed;
• financial support for care of a family member – paid to employees taking care of a sick family member, and sometimes of a healthy child aged under 10 for the first 9 (or 16 in case of a lone parent) calendar days of care for a sick child;
• maternity benefit – maternity leave is paid for the period of 28 weeks, of which 6 weeks before the expected date of delivery;
• pregnancy and maternity compensation benefit – provided to female employees who had to be moved to another less paid job due to pregnancy (maternity or nursing).

The figures on state social support benefits paid include income-tested benefits such as child benefit, social benefit and housing benefit, and non-income-tested benefits such as parental benefit, foster care benefit, birth grant and funeral grant. The heating and rental benefits shown in the tables and constructed like income-tested benefits were paid between 1 July 1997 and 30 June 2000 and between 1 July 1997 and 31 December 2000, respectively. Transport benefit (paid up to 30 June 2004), school teaching aids allowance (payments effective from 1 June 2006 to 31 December 2007), providing-for benefit (paid up to 31 December 2004) and child care benefit for a child in a facility for children in need of immediate assistance (payments effective from 1 October 2005 to 31 May 2006) were paid in the past.

Characteristics of some of the state social support benefits:

• child benefit – basic long-term benefit provided to families with dependent children, the amount depends on the age of the child and the income of the family;
• social benefit – aimed to help low-income families to cover the costs of their needs. Entitlement to the benefit is based on taking care of a dependent child and fixed family income limit. The social benefit is raised in cases where the child has a long-term severe disability, a long-term disability or a long-term illness; situations where the parent is disabled or alone are taken into account;
• housing benefit – aimed to help low-income families and individuals to cover their housing costs;
• parental benefit – provided to a parent who throughout the calendar month personally and duly cares for a child who is the youngest in the family;
• foster care benefits and grants – contribution to the costs of care of a child entrusted to foster care. They include foster child allowance, foster parent allowance, fostering grant and motor vehicle grant;
• birth grant – a one-off payment to parents for each child to cover extraordinary expenses related to childbirth (a non-income-tested benefit). Also persons who have taken a child up to the age of one year into permanent care replacing parental care are entitled to the birth grant;
• funeral grant – a one-off payment to a person who has arranged for the funeral of a dependent child, or to a person who was the parent of a dependent child provided the deceased had permanent residence in the Czech Republic on the date of death.

The adoption of the Social Services Act No. 108/2006 Sb., as amended, introduced in 2007 a change of social service type classification and iniciated the establishment of the social service providers register. Before 2007 the data were collected for individual social service establishments and the specific establishment reported detailed figures only for the prevailing type of social services while other social services were covered only by supplementary data. Since 2008 a different methodology of statistical surveys on social services has been used subsisting in the observation of data for each registered social service in a separate report. This methodology increased the number of data obtained from the reporting unit enabling to obtain more precise data on social services registered and provided. Due to this reason some data for 2007 and 2008 are not comparable with the data from the previous years and even the data for 2007 and 2008 are not mutually comparable. The figures on social service establishment capacities are based on actual deployment of services provided.

Characteristics of selected types of social service establishments:

• homes for people with disabilities – offer residential services to people with limited self-sufficiency due to disability that need regular assistance of another person;
• homes for seniors – offer residential services to people with limited self-sufficiency due to old age that need regular assistance of another person;
• homes with special care – offer residential services to people with limited self-sufficiency due to chronic mental illness or addiction and to people with senile dementia, Alzheimer’s dementia or other type of dementia who need regular assistance of another person. The care in these establishments is tailored to the needs of individuals;
• homeless shelters – offer short-term residential services to people who are in a difficult social situation caused by the loss of housing;
• half-way houses – offer temporary residential services to persons up to 26 years of age who leave school facilities for execution of institutional and protective care after reaching their majority. In some cases they provide services also for persons from other institutional facilities for child and youth care.