Thalia Dragonas, Professor at the University of Athens, MP Anna Frangoudaki, Professor at the University of Athens Intervention in the UN forum on Minority Issues Description of a good practice, as an example, in the discussion on the Recommendations on Minorities and the Right to Education, proposed by the Secretariat Greece implemented for the past ten years a large-scale intervention project aiming at reforming the education of the Muslim minority in Western Thrace. The Project is co-financed by the European Union (80%) and the Greek Ministry of Education. Close to two hundred specialists from various disciplines led by a team from the University of Athens have been responsible for the overall design of the project, the development of new educational materials, teacher training and multi-focus work within the community. The target population The minority population lives in the province of Thrace, in the north-east of Greece bordering Bulgaria and Turkey. The student population currently consists of 7,500 children in primary school and 3,100 adolescents in the gymnasium (the three-year secondary school part of the Greek compulsory education system). They are Greek citizens of Muslim religion, some Slav-speaking and most Turkish-speaking and of Turkish ethnic identity. The Turkish language is taught in minority schools as maternal language so much to Turkophones as to ethnically and linguistically Muslim Pomaks (Slavic-speaking Muslims) and to Roma, several of whom speak Turkish while others speak Romani. Almost 90% of the parents of this population choose to send their children to separate primary schools, called ‘minority schools’, which are regulated by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and bilateral agreements between Greece and Turkey. There is a double curriculum, in that teachers who respectively belong to the majority and the minority populations teach half of the subjects in Greek and the other half in Turkish. A large number of children have been completing primary education with a very poor command of the Greek language. For secondary education, there are two minority gymnasia of the same structure such as in the case of minority primary schools. Twenty-five percent of students attend these minority gymnasia, while the other 75% enroll in mainstream state schools. The poor quality of schooling at primary level and limited knowledge of the Greek language lead to a dropout rate from the compulsory secondary level of almost four times higher than the national mean. Project Activities