The Ministry of Education should extend compulsory education to five-year-olds, the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Bureau said in a report on Tuesday.
Investing in young children is investing in the nation’s future, especially as Taiwan grapples with a low birthrate, the report said.
The nation for the first time recorded more deaths than births last year.
The report was compiled after the National Policy Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), made a similar call last month, saying that extending compulsory education to five-year-olds would improve the quality of education for that age group.
The government has been looking into the issue since 1984, when extending the coverage of compulsory education was mentioned in an education reform proposal, but no significant progress has been made, the report said.
While the compulsory education system covers children aged six to 15, about 96 percent of five-year-olds were enrolled in kindergartens each year from 2015 to 2019, the report said.
The tuition of children who attend public kindergartens has been paid by the ministry through subsidies introduced in 2011, which have also been used to partly cover the tuition for children who attend private kindergartens, it said.
The ministry needs to take action, considering several countries have done so, the report said, citing Argentina, Poland, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam as examples.
The ministry should look into issues such as funding and the possible effects of such a change on the compulsory education system, and draft a plan with a timeline for its implementation, the report said.
The plan could be implemented in stages; for example, first in selected municipalities before being introduced nationwide, it said.
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