24/05/2007
Child care in Bulgaria
The Sofia Discussion club for Social Local Policy has taken the PES Child care campaign to its heart, and produced an excellent leaflet on child care in their country.
Below we publish extracts of the leaflet in English.
From 1995 to 2001 over 18 kindergartens were closed in Sofia following a decision by the capital city’s Council.
In the last school year about 3000 children from Sofia could not enter council kindergartens and nursery schools due to a lack of free places.
Municipal and state services as well as private kindergartens are placed in the buildings of many functioning kindergartens. The preferential rents offered to private educational institutions do lead to lower prices. Thus the municipality does not support children and parents, but rather the owners of private kindergartens. And that despite a big shortage of places in municipal child care establishments.
Less than 10 % of up-to-three-years-old children in Bulgaria have places in public educational establishments. Only five European countries have a worse record. The amount of child care for three-to-six years-old children in Bulgaria is about 73 %. These figures are far below the EU child care targets of 33% for children up-to-three-years-old and 90 % of children aged from three to school age.
The Discussion club for Social Local Policy calls for:
- Places in municipal kindergartens in Sofia from September 2007 for all who want them;
- The municipal authorities to pay compensation to all parents whose children cannot be accepted in the kindergartens, equal to the annual municipal subsidy for one child in a preschool educational establishment;
- A moratorium on selling children’s educational establishments in the capital city as well as in the other big cities until the long-term needs of the population become clear;
- A social right for each child of pre-school care in the Republic of Bulgaria;
- A strategy for integrating children from gipsy origin in the pre-school care system;
- Qualified medical personnel, as well as psychologists, in each kindergarten;
- Active tuition as well as care in kindergartens.
To promote the leaflet, members of the Bulgarian Socialist Party organised a football tournament between children from kindergarten in Sofia with special guests: 
Alexandra Dobolyi (MEP and internaitonal Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Party), Bulgarian MEP Kristian Vigenin, Bulgarian MP Dr Iva Stankova and Sofia City Council Member Boris Tsvetkov.
In a related action Kristian Vigenin installed ramps in 70 places across Sofia and in 7 other towns in Bulgaria to make movement easier for parents with prams, wheel-chairs and bicycles.
The Discussion Club for Social Local Policy (DCSLP) also met PES President Poul Nyrup Rasmussen and PES Secretary General Philip Cordery (SG) when they visited Sofia to explain what they were doing on child care.
The photos in the leaflet show
A former kindergarten in the residential district “Izgrev”. It now houses the municipal administration.
A desolated kindergarten in the housing estate “Youth” 1 in Sofia. The building and the yard are privatized.
A ransacked kindergarten in the “Drujba” housing estate. The land is for sale.
A kindergarten in the residential district “Lozenetz”. It had enormous grounds and a little zoo. 70% of the ground is now built on. The owners and councillors have left two slides for children.
A former kindergarten in the residential district “Izgrev”. It now houses the municipal administration.
You can find more on the internet site: http://www.dksmp.red-y.info/
