During the transition to Estonian-language education, Tallinn lost around a hundred kindergarten teachers due to language proficiency issues, forcing the city to reduce the number of teachers per group in several kindergartens. At the same time, there is also a shortage of teachers in Estonian-language kindergartens, and some of the career changers recruited by the city have struggled to meet job expectations.
“We were forced to switch to a 1+2 system in most transition kindergartens: one teacher and two assistants. This allowed Tallinn to ensure that by September 1, every group had at least one teacher with a C1-level language proficiency or a native Estonian speaker,” said Aleksei Jašin (Eesti 200), Tallinn’s deputy mayor responsible for education.
“If we had stuck with the previous system – two teachers and one assistant – we would have been short about a hundred teachers at the start of the school year. That was not realistic,” Jašin added.
The Preschool Childcare Institutions Act permits the 1+2 system, and according to Jašin, some other municipalities in Estonia also use it, primarily to save money, since the salary of a kindergarten assistant is lower than that of a teacher. (For comparison, a teacher’s salary in Tallinn is around €1,820, while an assistant earns about €1,100 before taxes.)
Estonian-language kindergartens are largely unaffected by this system change, and in transition kindergartens, the arrangement is temporary, Jašin emphasized.
More read: ERR.EE