An investigation by the Jing Chuan Child Safety Foundation found that 80 percent of the nation’s kindergarten classrooms failed fire safety requirements. Presenting the findings on Thursday last week, the foundation said that the issue was due to a lack of government oversight. It cited an incident last year in which kindergarteners died during a field trip.
For many years, there have been reports of a lack of effective government regulation of kindergartens. A Taipei Times article on May 6, 2016, cited a National Federation of Teachers’ Unions (NFTU) committee member as expressing concerns about safety at kindergartens and unqualified teachers.
Kindergarten teachers often lack proper credentials, and there is a high turnover rate, NFTU early childhood education committee member Lai Min-li (賴閔莉) said, adding that kindergartens are often profit-driven and use tricks to bypass tuition fee limits.
The following month, NFTU president Chang Hsu-cheng (張旭政) called for an end to subsidies for private kindergartens, saying that directing funds to such expensive, profit-driven schools limits the funding that can be invested in public kindergartens. Chang said that 70 percent of kindergartens in Taiwan were private, and that despite operators claiming that their students would get a head start on their academic abilities, private kindergartens produced no noticeable advantage.
However, it is not surprising that many Taiwanese families send their children to private preschools and kindergartens, as access to public options is limited and granted through a lottery system, with the latest data showing that only 20 percent of children in most areas are selected for admission.
Children as young as two years old are eligible for a place in a preschool, according to an amendment to Article 3 of the Early Childhood Education and Care Act (幼兒教育及照顧法) that took effect on June 29.
However, each county and municipality has its own regulations on the number of preschool places that must be provided and who is eligible. For example, the Taipei Department of Education’s preschool admission guidelines for the 2022-2023 academic year say that five-year-olds would be prioritized over younger children applying at public preschools. All the city’s preschools accept applications on behalf of children as young as three, but only some preschools admit two-year-olds.
Yahoo News on June 2 reported that Taipei has 736 preschools, which can admit up to 8,509 children in total, after accounting for prioritized slots given to children with disabilities. There are 6,518 slots for children aged three to five and 1,991 slots for two-year-olds, the report said.
Taipei recorded 19,029 births in 2020, meaning there are about 10 times more two-year-olds in the city than there are public preschool places for them.
The central government this year increased daycare and kindergarten subsidies, but private school fees are still a heavy burden for many families, and that is on top of concerns that parents might have about private schools’ safety and the qualifications of their teachers.
Universities in Taiwan have for several years reported declining enrollment numbers, and some private universities closed down over the issue. Meanwhile, parents are struggling to find suitable daycare and preschool options for their children.The government should offer retraining and employment options for academics at universities that are facing closures. Thereby it could solve two problems at once: It could boost early-education programs and help educators facing unemployment find new jobs. Academics could be offered a hybrid employment model with part-time work at a public preschool and part-time research or teaching at a university.
Whatever solution it implements, the government must find a way to offer better preschool options if it is serious about tackling the declining birthrate.
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