On September 19, 2017, Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Georgia Lia Gigauri met with the representatives of the Council of Religions of the Public Defender of Georgia. The meeting was attended by the employees of the Ministry of Education, the Public Defender's Office and the Tolerance Center.

The purpose of the meeting was to introduce recommendations, developed by the Council of Religions for state agencies, to the Ministry of Education and Science. The considerable part of the recommendations addresses the Ministry of Education and Science. They concern issues, such as protection of neutrality, creation of non-discriminatory environment, fight against xenophobia at schools, higher educational establishments and kindergartens, teachers' professional development and raising their consciousness of tolerance, as well as problems related to textbooks.

Deputy Minister of Education and Science Lia Gigauri spoke about the efforts carried out by the Ministry and its subordinate agencies in response to the issues raised in the recommendations.

According to the information provided by Natia Natsvlishvili, teachers' competence development program manager at the National Center for Teacher Professional Development, syllabus and training modules of multicultural education are included both in the programs of higher education and the National Center for Teacher Professional Development.

According to the recommendations of the Public Defender and various NGOs, the Ministry of Education and Science has already developed a textbook assessment tool in relation to the sensitivity towards multicultural and religious neutrality. - "New textbooks will be removed immediately, if they cannot meet the requirements in this regard. We plan to hold trainings for potential authors and upload draft textbooks on the website in order to make them available for everybody and take into consideration recommendations of various experts,"- stated the Deputy Minister of Education and Science.

It was planned at the meeting that the National Center for Teacher Professional Development will introduce training programs developed by them to the representatives of the Council of Religions in detail and will cooperate with the experts selected by the Council for creating new training modules. It was also decided that Nana Kilasonia, the Head of the Textbook Approval Division, will organize meetings between the Council of Religions and potential authors of textbooks in order to discuss how to reflect the issue of religious and ethnic diversity in the textbooks.