Following are excerpts from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's remarks at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting today:

"The academic year will open tomorrow, 1.9.08.  1.4 million students will go to school.  Of these, almost 10%, over 135,000, will be going to first grade.

(…).
  
This Government devotes to education, I would say, almost more than to any other subject, not just in terms of resources, which approach NIS 30 billion in the 2009 budget, but also in terms of thinking, reforms [and] a different approach.  I would like to remind you that we are building 8,000 new classrooms, 40% of them in the non-Jewish sector, which is both unprecedented and unavoidable.  We committed ourselves to reducing the number of students in a classroom to 32.  We are doing this, spread over several years, but we will do this as part of the reforms."
 
Prime Minister Olmert hailed both the New Horizon reform program and Education Minister Yuli Tamir's contributions to it and added:

"The security of the State of Israel, its future security, the stability of its existence and its chances for prosperity depend – first and foremost – on the quality of our education system.  When I say the security of its existence, I mean both in physical and military terms, and in all other areas naturally associated with security.  All of this starts with the quality of good education, in dealing with toddlers and children at risk and in maintaining their security as they go to school, with all that this entails."