After a week and a half, Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev officially acknowledged the scale of the teachers' strike, the teachers are demanding a 100 per cent salary increase. On October 3, Stanishev said that the country was faced with “a serious reality with the entire education sector going on strike”. Stanishev was speaking at a conference in Sofia entitled Second Decade of Growth: Risks and Opportunities, organised by Bulgarian newspaper Kapital and German newspaper Handelsblatt.

“The Government acknowledges that there was a serious problem with Bulgarian education sector,” Stanishev said. Indeed in the past week publications in Bulgarian-language media suggested that Government officials were avoiding contact with the teachers who are on strike, making the situation worse. One reason for such hints was Education Minister Daniel Vulchev's refusal on October 2 to accept the teachers' invitation for talks. However, with more and more teachers joining the strike, together with university professors and the growing public support for them, Stanishev now showed more sympathy for the teachers.

He admitted that teachers were underpaid, even compared to other people in the public sector although pointing out that teachers made up a fifth of the approximately 500 000 people employed in the country's public sector. The Government had offered a gradual salary increase over the coming months that would add up to a cumulative 30 per cent, he said. In the end, however, Stanishev offered nothing new to teachers. He said that money could be found from the budget to allocate no more than the 30 per cent gradual increase in teachers' salaries.

Furthermore Stanishev took another approach saying that the other problem with Bulgarian education was the quality of secondary and tertiary education. As a society, Bulgaria needed to invest more in education and in scientific research, while concentrating on reform. These reforms should include the decentralisation of school management and an end to the artificial thresholds in teacher/pupil ratios. Stanishev called on business to do more to help enhance the quality of education, for the sake of the much-needed improvement of the skills of the Bulgaria's labour market.

Ivo Prokopiev, chairperson of the Confederation of Employers and Industrialists in Bulgaria, said that there had been no reform of Bulgaria's education system in the past 10 years, under the most recent three governments, and the education system was of low quality and declining. Given the demographic changes, which would see the country's population decrease substantially, there should be a reduction in the number of teachers, and any increase in payment should be conditional on an increase in the quality of education, Prokopiev said.

While Government and business officials were discussing the state of Bulgaria's education system teachers continued with their actions. For two days in a row teacher held protest rallies in Sofia. On October 3 teachers gathered around Parliament shouting “resignation” and “teachers are hungry”. Again the teachers demanded a 100 per cent increase in salaries, while Vulchev told parliament that this was an ultimatum that would not be accepted. At the same time Vulchev said he had invited trade unions for talks on October 5. This was his response to the two major trade unions, Podkrepa and KNSB, which had said that they were willing to talk to the Government and President Georgi Purvanov, who offered his assistance. Of the opposite opinion was Yanka Takeva, leader of Bulgarian Teachers Union, part of KNSB, who told the rally that teachers had to be firm with their demands and not take a step back. Takeva said that teachers all around Bulgaria were supporting the strike and some of them had even gone on hunger strike. All these contradicting messages added to the confusion of who was willing to talk and who was not, while parents and children, ultimately, remain the big losers in this situation.