Starting with the 2024-2025 school year, educators will develop a descriptive assessment report for kindergarten children, essential for enrollment in the preparatory class. The report will cover various areas of development, but Education expert Marian Staș warns that an overly complex educational model could become overwhelming and that decentralization could offer solutions more adapted to local needs.
What a child needs to know by the end of big group – Photo Shutterstock
According to a document submitted for consultation by the Ministry of Education, from the 2024-2025 school year, educators will be required to prepare a descriptive evaluation report for each child at the end of kindergarten, necessary for enrollment in the preparatory class. The report will be a standard document that highlights the level of knowledge and skills of the child, essential for his preparation for life and adaptation in the school environment. It will be completed by the team made up of the teaching staff and the school counselor, being a confidential document that will only be communicated to the child’s parents or legal representatives.
The report will guide teachers in personalizing the learning process, adapting it to the needs and potential of each child.
The document covers several areas of development. Concretely, it is about physical development, cognitive development and knowledge of the world, language development, communication, reading and writing premises, socio-emotional development and learning capacities and attitudes.
Among other things, educators must assess coordination of movements, independence in personal hygiene, behavior in games, healthy eating habits, the ability to work in a team, create and build shapes, describe the needs of living things, count and experience the cause-effect relationship. They also observe the ability to tell stories, correct grammar, recognize letters, write, participate in discussions, follow rules of behavior, social adaptation, express emotions and curiosity for learning. In total, we are talking about 40 indicators that a child must tick at the end of the large group.
Educational models must be adapted to reality
Marian Staș, an education expert, suggests that the decentralization of the education system could allow schools to develop their own curriculum models, adapted to the specific needs of their community.
Does the new report put pressure on kindergarten children? “The honest answer from Harvard is: It depends.”says the expert in educational policies Marian Staș.
“It depends on many factors and it’s about what the distance from model to reality means. Because a model must be complete. No matter how loaded, difficult it may seem, it is important to be as completely done as possible. My observations are as follows: First, the big categories are the important ones. That is, it is about coordination, relating, thinking, rationing and so on. It’s an obviously necessary model that covers the natural components of children’s growth. It is possible that their declination into specific components is a bit too rich.”, explains Marian Staș for “The truth”.
This is because we are talking about five large categories, each divided into 5-10 sub-points.
He emphasizes that while educational models must be comprehensive and well structured, they must also be flexible to adapt to the diversity of communities and local contexts. As for putting the model into practice, “the shades are very rich“, emphasizes the expert.
“This is also the reason for one of my important pleas for decentralization, for opening up the model to communities. Because, certainly, communities from Transylvania operate psycho-emotionally differently from communities from Moldova, or from Muntenia, or from Dobrogea, or from Crisana, or from everywhere, because people are different. And then the model that has safety will be nuanced by how the people there function, and the educators, and the children, and the mothers, and the fathers, and so on. It is a very normal and natural reason for life to beat the film, in other words for the reality on the ground to be stronger than the model, because, especially at these cruel ages, where children are 90% dependent on mommy and daddy, and family, family values beat any kind of pattern without any problem. And it’s natural, it’s normal to happen like that, even at older ages. Then, it is very interesting to see what will be the nuances, what will be the declinations, or the psychobehavioral decryptions, specific to each individual region“, Marian Staș explains.
The education expert emphasizes the importance of decentralizing the educational curriculum, arguing that schools should have the freedom to adapt their curriculum models according to the specifics of the community and the needs of the children in that area.
Competitive parents
Marian Staș expresses concern about the excessive competitive pressure on children from urban and corporate environments and questions whether the current education system is preparing professionals well enough to handle these challenges.
“Exaggerations are also possible. We are what we are and the current generations of parents work extremely competitively, especially those in corporate and urban environments. Some parents, if the three-, four-, five-year-old child is not the coolest in the parking lot, consider it a global disaster, a family tragedy.“, adds the expert.
“Things must be managed with a grain of wisdom, but I think the role of educators, people in the system, will be very important. I don’t know to what extent the system produces professionals to handle the story as it is. In any case, the model is a round one, so, complex and has the necessary, important pieces in it, it is a good reference of what should mean a nuanced and effective development of children to take on primary education .”he pointed out.
However, an overly complex educational model with many subcategories can become overwhelming for both children and educators.
“My feeling is that the big categories contain a bit too many subcategories within them. It seems to me a lot for adults as well, but for children“, said Marian Staș.
On the other hand, access to early education in Romania is limited. More precisely, our country ranks last in terms of the participation rate in preschool education, i.e. 82.4% go to kindergarten according to Eurostat data. This while the European average is 95.4%, according to the quoted source.
Given that educators have groups of up to 30 children, can they teach them all the things described in the report? “The correct answer is NO, the direct, instinctive behavior is bullshit, because you have to cover them all, and it’s not the only situation where the system is underpowered anyway. It would still be a situation of superficial behaviors, done just to be done.”, concludes Professor Staș.
