Early childhood development
Pre-school education is critical for children's mental development. Children who go to pre-school do better throughout their educational lives; children who don't go do worse. It's as simple as that. Unfortunately, the state of pre-school education in Azerbaijan is just as simple to assess: it's appalling. The latest data show that only 9 per cent of children attend any form of pre-school, and in rural areas the figure is a derisory 2 per cent. What's worse, the situation has actually been deteriorating. This decline is largely the result of one simple fact: there aren't enough kindergartens. Most parents say they think pre-school is important and they could afford to send their children to study if there were a kindergarten available. But pre-schools, already in short supply, have been disappearing rapidly as the result of a government privatisation programme, which has seen kindergartens closed and reopened as something more profitable. In one recent survey, 29 out of 30 kindergartens privatised in Baku had been shut down. The result is that, even if every place in every pre-school class in Azerbaijan were occupied, there would be room only for 25 per cent of the children who should be there. To make matters worse, state allocations for the schools that do exist are low, covering not much more than teachers' salaries and food. Those schools that are open are running on shoe-string budgets and producing the kind of quality of education one might expect. In education, as all else, you get what you pay for. Clearly, there is an urgent need to act. UNICEF has successfully advocated for the government to include early childhood development in the second stage of its education reforms and there is high-level agreement on the importance of improving the situation. In 2007, the President signed a decree on reform of the pre-school system. The Presidential Programme on Modernisation of Pre-schools calls for the building of new kindergartens and the renovation of existing ones. It also mandates a new curriculum (which has now been developed by UNICEF) and the creation of alternatives to meet current demand, such as short-term play groups. Although a law covering early childhood education has yet to be passed, the State Programme of Poverty Reduction and Social Development for 2006-2015, which is the major blueprint for how the government intends to meet the Millennium Development Goals, calls for an increase of 2.5 times in the number of grade one entrants attending pre-school by 2015.
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