US overseer Paul Bremer turned over control of Iraq's education ministry to interim Iraqi leaders yesterday as part of plans by the US-led coalition to restore national sovereignty by June 30.

The education ministry became the second government department to gain its independence from the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which has ruled Iraq since toppling the former regime on April 9 last year.

On March 28, Bremer gave interim health minister Khidr Abbas the key to his ministry, one of the 25 that will make up the transitional Iraqi government set to take power in less than three months time.

"As we look to the construction of Iraq's future, no ministry, no part of the government is more important that the ministry of education," Bremer said at the handover ceremony here.

"In the new and free Iraq, no longer will education suffer as it did under Saddam (Hussein)'s tyranny," he said.

Iraq's interim education minister Alaaeddin Alwan said one his priorities would be "restoring Iraqi education to at least reach the level of the 1980s."

To reach this goal the ministry will train a 290,000-strong teaching body in cooperation with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the United Nations' children's fund (Unicef), he said.

Last week Alwan chaired a two-day symposium to prepare a new curriculum for Iraqi schools that he said would be fully reformed by 2007 and purged from ideologies imposed by the former ruling Baath party.

Echoing Alwan's message, about 40 schoolchildren from the Al Hariri school in Baghdad sang two songs glorifying Iraq, freedom and peace, at the ceremony.