Roma Children: International Approaches to Improving Participation in Early Years Childcare and Education

September 16, 2024

Tatjana Buklijas, Mihai Surdu

Across the world, governments recognise the need for children to participate in early years childcare and education.

Research suggests that high-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) can have a positive and long-lasting effect on children’s outcomes, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and parents’ ability to work and their quality of life. However, there is also evidence that children who stand to gain most, are least likely to access the funded entitlements.

As part of IPPO’s exploration of the barriers and facilitators that encourage participation in ECEC, INGSA has conducted an international scan looking at how countries outside the United Kingdom have approached ensuring equitable participation of ethnic minority families, as well as other minoritised or disadvantaged groups.

In this blog, we describe how policymakers have encouraged higher levels of participation among Roma children across Europe and the key issues that have arisen when shaping ECEC policy.

Participation of the Roma children

The Roma are one the largest and most disadvantaged minority groups in Europe, with a lower participation in early childhood education than the general population.

These early experiences, followed by lower school participation, are part of the explanation for the huge gap in social and economic outcomes between Roma and other European peoples, setting the stage for a persistent cycle of disadvantage.

With the support of NGOs and governmental organisations, over the past few decades across Europe, there have been several new initiatives to encourage Roma participation in ECEC.

Cost is an important barrier

A key condition for ensuring that Roma have access to high-quality ECEC and preschool is removing the cost barriers.

From 2014 to 2015, a randomised controlled trial was conducted across Bulgaria to understand better which interventions might improve full-day kindergarten participation of poor children, especially Roma and Turkish.

Tested interventions included:

1. A community campaign informing parents about benefits of kindergartens

2. Removal of the fees

3. Providing financial incentives to parents (food vouchers) conditional on the attendance of kindergarten.

The trial showed that removing the fees produced a 19% increase in enrolment as well as increased daily attendance by about 20%. The additional financial incentives did not have an impact on measured outcomes and were more expensive to administer. The information campaign increased enrolment but not attendance.

An interesting and challenging finding was that the developmental outcomes took three years to show the improvement.

The evaluation was used to advocate a policy to increase participation of 4- to 6-year-old children in kindergarten, which was adopted by the Bulgarian Parliament in 2020. However, researchers who had been involved in the project from the start, warn that without improving the quality of kindergartens, these policy gains towards expanding access remain fragile.

Teaching staff with cultural and linguistic skills is key

Cultural issues play a big role. Parents may believe the children are too young to attend preschool or think that the attendance of preschool was of no particular benefit to the child if care was available at home or simply not feel at home at ECEC centres. The employment of Roma teaching assistants is based on the concept of “cultural brokers”. Few countries adopted this strategy at a national level – with Serbia being a stand-out country.

A study conducted in 21 countries where Roma teaching assistants were hired in early education and in primary schools, and a qualitative study in Serbia and the UK, found positive impacts of hiring Roma staff across many domains: children’s cognitive and academic outcomes, social-emotional development, communication with the families, and trust between the parents and the institutions. It was noted that the Roma teaching assistants in the UK were less effective when they were not fully fluent in English.

The key recommendation of this study was that hiring Roma assistants is valuable and should be encouraged, but it should be done in a way that guarantees professional development and career prospects. Ad hoc hiring with minimal training and few networking opportunities should be avoided. At the same time, recruiting Roma ECEC staff should not mean that the teaching staff at ECE centres should delegate all the responsibility for interacting with Roma families to these teaching assistants.

Building language skills and parental confidence through story reading

Reading stories in the family or in an informal setting to Roma children of preschool age is an innovative method for raising school preparedness and avoiding segregation in primary schools. The Roma Education Fund implemented a program of preliteracy training “Your Story” in 16 localities in four countries (Hungary, Macedonia, Romania and Slovakia). The nine-month project focused on the empowerment of Romani mothers to read (aloud and everyday) story books in groups moderated by a facilitator and discuss them with their children. Most of the Roma women involved had not completed more than lower secondary education. The facilitator’s role was to increase mothers’ self-confidence in reading and discussing stories, abilities which were afterwards transferred to children. The project donated storybooks to help build Roma families’ libraries. The evaluation found that mothers attending the “Your Story” program value kindergarten significantly more than mothers who have not participated. The project improved kindergarten enrolment and increased Roma academic skills.

Interventions like “Your Story” have been implemented over the years in several other projects and locations. Researchers found that early reading based on parents reading their children’s books at home is an effective, evidence-based intervention for the cognitive and academic development of children from disadvantaged families as well as for children from ethnic minorities. A recent evaluation study found that reading children’s stories at home not only improves vocabulary and reading skills but also their writing abilities. Importantly, this study acknowledges that the intervention effects on writing tended to be stronger for children from low maternal education households, thus reducing some of the early achievement gaps evident in writing skills.

Scaling up parental support through communities

Another evaluated project is Omama (Slovakia), which won the SozialMarie prize for Social Innovation in Central and Eastern Europe in 2019. The project conducted by the Slovak civic organisation Cesta von (Way Out) is an early child development home-visiting program which supports the cognitive, social, and physical development of Roma children (0-4 years) living in poverty. As part of the Omama program, regular home visits are delivered by local Roma women (Omamas). The Omamas are trained by psychologists, special educators and doctors. Omamas stimulate kids through educational activities and games, directly in the families’ homes or homes of Omamas. Omamas teach the Roma mothers to better stimulate their children through reading books together, playing games, and teaching them colours, shapes, words, and numbers.

The impact of the Omama program has been measured in collaboration with the University of Oxford. The neurodevelopment of 2-year-old children in the program is compared with the results in control samples of children from settlements outside the Omama program and children from the majority ethnic group. A study carried out in 2022 found that Omama intervention was improving neurocognitive (cognitive, gross motor and linguistic) outcomes among poor Roma children. No impact on the take up of ECEC among involved families has been reported in the literature.

Conclusion

For all the differences between the Roma and other ethnic and linguistic minority groups, research examining and evaluating ECEC innovations in Roma has produced insights that are likely broadly applicable. First, the cost is a crucial barrier but getting the children enrolled and attending is only the first step. Second, securing parental understanding, confidence and trust is important and it can be done in various ways, through employing the culturally and linguistically competent staff or creating strong community connections, perhaps through senior (grandparental) generation. Third, trialling ECEC programmes in a way that makes collecting effectiveness data easier is important, for example through randomised controlled trials. Evaluations should last long enough to collect data that may not be available within a year or two (e.g. on developmental outcomes, vs enrolment and attendance). Collaborations between policymakers and researchers could lead to expanding the range of outcomes to be tracked.