Zliten had 17 schools before the revolution. Now it has four. Because Qaddafi’s forces stockpiled munitions inside them, NATO bombed the rest. Smashed buildings have not been replaced and some classes are now being held in shipping containers.

Education in the town is in crisis.  Some children must walk seven kilometres to lessons, while academic attainment has nose-dived.

Anger at their plight brought more than a hundred pupils and teachers to the prime minister’s office today, demanding that proper schools be provided as a matter of urgency.  If the government does not act quickly, both pupils and teachers are threatening to go on strike.

“There are thirteen damaged schools because of the war against the former regime ” local headmaster Hassan Mohamed Zaboob told the Libya Herald. The principal of Rebel Martyr School added “We had several meetings with the minister of education and some representatives from the government but nothing  has happened so far”.

Zaboob said that because there were only four functioning schools, classes also had to be held in the evenings and some were taught in containers. The overcrowding was compounded by a lack of washrooms and recreational facilities. Children were hard-pressed to do their homework, he said, and academic attainment levels had plunged by 50 percent.