The Ministry of Education is amending the Early Childhood Education Act, which requires children to obtain a place in nursery school within a maximum of two months. According to the Child Welfare Services Union, ministries have promised to change the law over the past decade.
With the change in the law, childcare will move from the Ministry of Social Affairs to the Ministry of Education and Research. Group nursery schools will also disappear, that is, children aged between one and a half and three years will only be able to attend nursery schools. At the same time, a three-year-old child no longer has to move from nursery to kindergarten, but can stay there until the age of seven.
“The biggest benefit is definitely that childcare becomes part of early childhood education,” Mari Kummer, CEO of the Estonian Childcare Association, told ERR. “These are no longer places where you can take your child, where he is cared for, but where his development is truly supported. It is no longer a place to feed and change diapers,” she said.
Kummer explained that once local governments can start offering parents private places in daycare centers, queues at daycare centers will be much shorter. At the same time, Kummer said that changing the law on nursery schools has been permitted for almost ten years.
“Until we have a new law on early childhood education, which would put child care under the Ministry of Education, it won’t be possible to do this for that long,” Kummer said. “It has always been said that kindergartens will immediately become educational institutions, but why did it take so long?”
According to Marge Hindriks, counselor of the Department of Children and Family of the Ministry of Social Affairs, they have not stopped the change of the law, but the Ministry of Education and Science is responsible for it.
“Every time this bill has been introduced, there has been no downtime on our part,” Hindriks said. “We look forward to and again support the advancement of this bill.”
The Riigikogu has already rejected the overly harsh wording once
However, Maila Rajamets, head of early childhood education at the Ministry of Education and Research, said she could not justify the postponement with anything concrete. In June 2022, for example, the bill had already reached the National Assembly, but was rejected due to too harsh wording.
“There have been disputes between different interest groups regarding the curriculum,” Rajamets said. “And then they began to prepare this new version. There are some changes compared to the previous version of the draft, but we should find ourselves together halfway, without forgetting that there are children and families,” he explained.
Alice Ääro, a mother from Tallinn, said her one-and-a-half-year-old could not find a place in any kindergarten in her home area. Since then the child has attended two municipal nursery schools and one private one, as well as a nursery school.
“Very quickly we realized that the kindergarten environment and the teachers were quite negative: they did not support the child’s development,” Ääro said. “And then we decided on child care. Financially it was much more expensive, but in terms of everything else it was much, much better,” she said.
Äöro noted that while the municipal kindergarten paid 70 euros per month, private nurseries and kindergartens had to pay 500 and 700 euros per month, respectively. Added to this was the price of food.
Maila Rajamets of the Ministry of Education and Research highlighted another advantage of the law change. In fact, if until now the income tax was reimbursed only from the nursery school fees, from next January parents will also receive the income tax refund from the nursery school fees.
The project also foresees that, in addition to the nursery schools, the speech therapist will also evaluate the children’s development twice a year in the nursery schools, explained Marge Hindriks.
“It is often the case today that a child’s need for additional help or age-inappropriate development goes unnoticed,” she said. “This change has the very, very big advantage of being able to reach these children earlier – we can start supporting them and helping them even before school,” Hindriks added.
2024-01-15 04:37:00
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