Czech Senate will abolish nurseries for two-year-olds

The Education Committee of the upper house of the Czech Parliament, the Senate, has agreed to change the law according to which nurseries in the Czech Republic are required to accept two year-old children from 2020. The Education Committee has approved the proposal of the extreme right wing politicial Václav Klaus Junior, who is now Chair of the Education Committee of the Czech Parliament. "The duty to accept two-year-old children by the nurseries was made part of the law [by the tnen Social Democratic government] in 2016. We do see this duty as a problem, as something we do not like, something that is not comfortable for us," said Senator and Deputy Head of the Education Committee Jiří Růžička, who represents the right-of-centre party TOP 09.Czech nursery teachers are complaining that taking care of two-year-olds is "too difficult". "We have had two-year old children in our nursery for three years now. Our teachers are exhausted, we do not have proper financial support from the Education Ministry," said a nursery head teacher from a town in Moravia. "Children need their mothers, their family background and a nursery cannot give them this." After the law was approved in 2016, a petition signed by 15 000 people demanding the ban of accepting two-year-olds in nursery schools, was launched. "It is clear that two-year-old children do not belong to nurseries, but to their mother´s embrace. We are here following the European Union approach, to place really small children in institutions. That is an unwholesome process which we want to stop," says the initiator of the petition and University lecturer Marek Herman.

A major Oxford university study, examining 6000 children, has recently found out that sending toddlers to some form of creche has a “significant positive effect” on  their language and socio-emotional development. “The benefits of early education and care were found regardless of a child’s family level of disadvantage,” the report found.  “Specifically education and care with childminders at age two had a significant positive effect on children’s language development and behaviour at the age of three.     Source in Czech HERE