Education experts yesterday questioned the benefits of the recent offer by presidential candidates to issue "nursery education vouchers" for pre-school age children.
When vice president and KMT presidential candidate Lien Chan (
Lien has proposed setting up more public kindergartens and extending vouchers for children attending private kindergartens and nursery schools to help reduce the financial burden on parents.
The voucher system has been implemented in Taipei and Kaohsiung cities since September 1998.
Under the proposal, children five and six years old would receive vouchers from the government worth NT$5,000 per semester, beginning in September.
The vouchers would only be valid at licensed kindergartens and nursery schools, and schools would be able to redeem the vouchers for their full amount.
Official statistics show 520,000 children aged between four and six years old -- about 80 percent of children in this age bracket -- attend kindergartens or nursery schools. Children attending private kindergartens and nursery schools make up 70 percent and 55 percent, respectively.
Parents sending their children to private kindergartens usually need to spend between NT$70,000 and NT$100,000 per year, which is at least triple the average cost per pupil at public kindergartens.
Chen has proposed offering the vouchers to children attending both public and private kindergartens, as long as the schools are licensed.
Children from low-income families would enjoy pre-school education free of charge under his plan. Chen has also aimed to increase the value of the vouchers slowly, with an ultimate goal to make pre-school education completely free of charge.
However, Chen Han-chiang (
"After an election, the education voucher usually was either abolished or replaced by other programs," said Chen, who was director of Taipei's Bureau of Education.
In Taiwan, Chen said, the policy has also been raised as a vote-getting tactic.
Chen pointed out that the policy was originally designed to give parents more freedom to choose where their children attend school and consequently spur greater competition between schools to boost the quality of their teaching. But there is no easy answer for solving these problems in Taiwan's education system, Chen said.
Chen said one of the most urgent issues the government needs to tackle is improving benefits for kindergarten teachers to attract more qualified teachers.
Less than 35 percent of kindergarten teachers are licensed, statistics show. Many teachers trained in pre-school education have opted to teach in primary schools because of the better benefits and salaries enjoyed by primary school teachers.
Su Hsiu-hua (蘇秀花), a section chief in charge of pre-schools at the Taipei City government's Bureau of Education, said her agency has published evaluations on pre-schools and kindergartens over the past 13 years to provide more information for parents on how to choose schools. Without the evaluations, she said, the voucher system would be incomplete.
Localities will need to establish a complete database on pre-school- and kindergarten-age children in their areas before the system can be effectively implemented, Su said.
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