Saturday, April 6, 2013

Encouraging Progress In Regards to Equity and Excellence in Romania


As I have learned from my Romanian child advocate contact, Theresa Creel, Romanian children have long faced equity issues of poverty, abandonment, discrimination and the lack of basic human rights (access to medical care, loving parental support, proper nutrition).  Romania continues to struggle in these areas, however, encouraging progress is being made to address the basic needs of Romanian children and to help ensure access for early education for all children.  Below are some examples of how organizations such as UNICEF and The World Bank have contributed to promoting child rights and early care and education in Romania:
“Children whose earliest years are blighted by hunger or disease or whose minds are not stimulated by appropriate interaction with adults and their environment pay for these early deficits throughout their lives - and so does society. Such children are far more likely than their more fortunate peers to do poorly in school, to drop out early, to be functionally illiterate, and to be only marginally employable in today's increasingly high-technology world. Collectively, these children who have been deprived in early life therefore affect labor productivity and national economic prosperity.” Armeane M. Choksi, The World Bank

1. Advocating for Children’s Rights:
According to the UNICEF website:
Romania has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been adopted by more than 190 countries. It lays out one set of legal rights for all children and young people, and recognizes that above anyone else it is parents who are the most important factors in a child’s upbringing and development. Secondly, Romania has pledged itself to the Millennium Development Goals, whose specific objectives include eliminating extreme poverty, improving maternal health, reducing the infant mortality rate by 40 per cent, reducing the mortality rate in children between 1-4 by 50 per cent, and eliminating measles, all between 2000 and 2015 (http://www.unicef.org/romania/media_11843.html)

2. Better Support for Parents through Early Childhood Education Training
Romania’s adoption of the National Parenting Education Program in Preschool Education in 2001 has impacted family knowledge, attitudes and practices related to early stimulation, positive disciplining, early care and parent-child interaction and protection. UNICEF supported the Foundation “Our Children” to provide training program for trainers in all counties; and to supervise the training program for kindergarten teachers, while monitoring the overall process for the Ministry of Education, Research and Youth. More than 70,000 parents have been trained, in almost 4,000 kindergartens and 370 schools, and the program has been included in the National Strategy on Early Education (developed by Ministry of Education, Research and Youth also with UNICEF support). One area where progress has been made is preschool process for children from minority and disadvantaged groups. Special program for increasing access of Roma children to pre-schools were introduced by UNICEF in partnership with MoERY and in collaboration with NGOs and later expanded by a Phare-funded project. Training
materials for teachers have also been developed for an integrated approach to ECD in line with the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Children and the Millennium Development Goals, and, while a gap still remains between Roma enrolment and overall enrolment in pre-schools, it is not as wide as it once was.

Furthermore, UNICEF launched an advocacy campaign promoting early childhood development with local governments in rural areas throughout Romania. The project, developed with Holt Romania under the slogan “The first three years in life – the most important years” saw conferences held for 162 rural communities, each ending with a symbolic signing of the Commitment for the Promotion of Early Education. Last year a parenting education caravan (the first of its kind in Romania) was added; “Parenting Education at Your Home” aimed to provide training and information materials on early education and development to the most needy parents in rural areas. Within the caravan 36 rural communities were out-reached and in each community a library on parenting and early education and development was set up, in partnership with the local government.

3. Advocating for Early Childhood Education for all Children – Changes in Policy
In June 2012, The Roma Education Fund, The World Bank, Open Society Foundations, and UNICEF joined the European Commission in its call on governments to ensure that all Romani and other poor and excluded children have access to quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) services.  All Romanian Member States acknowledged education as a priority area next to employment in their national Roma integration strategies. Moreover, 14 Member States proposed measures to widen access to early childhood education and care.  The European Commission called on Member States to increase enrolment in early childhood education and care among the most urgent policy priorities in several Country Specific Recommendations, stressing the need to eliminate school segregation and misuse of special needs education, improve teacher education and school mediation and raise parents' awareness of the importance of education.

4. Development of Early Learning Standards
Romania is in many ways ahead of the curve in understanding and coming to grips with the importance of early child development, and aiming to ensure its provision in sufficient quantity and quality. Romania made a major breakthrough in the region when it embarked and embraced Early Learning Development Standards (ELDS). UNICEF supported the training of national experts in ELDS formation and also supported the establishment of a multi-sector task force which provided expertise and feedback to a pool of national experts involved in the formulation of ELDS. (http://www.unicef.org/romania/media_11843.html)

3 comments:

  1. Hey, Collett! I am so glad you were able to contact someone for this course to talk with about early childhood education in the perspective of another country. I was not that fortunate. But I have learned a lot through reading your posts and blogs. You mentioned something in your blog about how hunger affects a child now and later in life. I got the opportunity to go the alternate route for this class and I learned a lot about that from the website Harvard University’s “Global Children’s Initiative” website http://developingchild.harvard.edu/initiatives/global_initiative/ and I found the "Three Core Concepts in Early Development" series to be very interesting. The interaction we have with our children affects them now and later in life; and the stressors that we do not think our children are even aware of affects them now and later in life. Poverty and child abuse and neglect are two major ones that will produce problems in our society if we continue to allow our children to grow up this way. Great post!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey, Collett, I really enjoyed your blog this week. You shared some interesting information. Every bit of it kept my attention.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very informative post about Romania. The interesting read for me was how Romania is taking the initiative to embrace early learning development standards, This is truly a promotion on their behalf to embark on quality early education, ensuring not just quality but quantity. Thanks for sharing these information with us.

    ReplyDelete