BARRIERS OF MARGINALIZED ROMA CHILDREN IN SLOVAKIA IN ACCESS TO PRE-PRIMARY EDUCATION

Pre-primary education, i.e. pedagogical care for three-to-six-year-old children in pre-primary schools, has a long tradition in Slovakia. Related to the child’s further educational career and overall development, its significance is indisputable, and it is one of the reasons why there has been a political discussion in the country on the accessibility of pre-primary education, particularly related to children from marginalized Roma communities. Such children are unambiguously the most vulnerable group from the perspective of the accessibility of high-quality education (including pre-primary one) with all consequences brought by weak education. The up-to-date studies show that pre-primary schools (as institutions of pre-primary education) are significantly less accessible for children from marginalized Roma communities than for other children, and these children are frequently “concentrated” in segregated and ethnically homogeneous schools. What “barriers” must they overcome on the way towards high-quality pre-primary education, and what barriers must pre-primary schools face? The paper states the findings on the barriers and problems related to education of poor Roma children in pre-primary schools from two studies conducted in Slovakia in which the author participated. The first one was conducted in 2014 as a part of the National Project “Inclusive Model in Pre-Primary Education” and the second one – current and so far unpublished – is a part of the project “Making Public Policies More Effective with Impact on Pre-Primary Education of Socially Disadvantaged Groups”. The stated findings are the result of the qualitative investigation (methods: focus group, in-depth interview) of the opinions of all local participants (parents, school representatives, representatives of local politics – self-governments and regional public administration, activists) and the analysis of the statistics on Roma communities and pre-primary education on the national, regional and local levels. The findings suggest that the geographical and financial accessibility of pre-primary schools means a serious problem for Roma children from the poor and segregated environment; the estimated child training rate among children from the segregated communities is lower than 50 % (the child training rate among the general population is about 80 %). The majority of Roma children speaking mainly the Romani language attends the segregated and ethnically homogeneous pre-primary schools in which the pedagogues cannot speak the Romani language and are not able to prepare children for their further education in the official (Slovak) language. Furthermore, the low accessibility of pre-primary schools for Roma children results from unwillingness of parents from the majority and some teachers to accept them in ethnically diverse classrooms and schools – for example, in one of the visited municipalities, Roma children are only in two out of almost ten pre-primary schools; in another municipality, there are not any ethnically diverse pre-primary schools.