A new BUPL survey shows that around 600 daycare rooms in Denmark have no permanent educator at all, prompting Enhedslisten to summon Minister for Children, the Elderly and Housing Jacob Mark to a parliamentary consultation.
DR reported on September 25 that Enhedslisten’s children’s spokesperson, Leila Stockmarr, has called the minister in for a samråd. The move follows a new membership survey from the educators’ union BUPL.
According to the survey, 600 rooms in Danish daycare institutions have no permanent educator attached, while 7,000 rooms have only one. More than 12,000 educators and managers answered questions about conditions in the institutions.
In the survey, 27 percent of educators said they were the only permanent educator in their room. Among managers, 13 percent said they had one or more rooms without a single permanent educator.
Stockmarr told DR that the public is entitled to hear what the minister intends to do. She stressed that the consultation is not a declaration of war, but that she needs to know what the plan is. Mark said he welcomes the attention on the children’s area.
Minister points to minimum staffing rules
Per DR, Mark said the figures show a pressing need to improve the minimum staffing requirements, known as minimumsnormeringer. Those rules set how many adults there must be per child in an institution.
The government platform from June proposes removing managers and staff on long-term sick leave from the staffing statistics. Mark said this means educators or pedagogical staff must be hired instead. He also argued for strengthening the upskilling fund that municipalities receive for qualifying pedagogical personnel.
BUPL said the rules do not solve the whole problem, because recruitment remains a major challenge. Nationally, educators top the list of occupations where employers have the hardest time recruiting qualified staff, according to the most recent figures from the Danish Agency for Labour Market and Recruitment. Denmark is also projected to lack thousands of pedagogues in the coming years.
Ekstra Bladet reports that BUPL called the findings alarming and argued there should be two educators in every room. Avisen.dk notes that the number of rooms without permanent educators rose from 400 to 600 compared with BUPL’s previous survey, while rooms with only one rose from 6,500 to 7,000.
As reported by Jyllands-Posten, business and parent organizations have criticized the situation. They argue that rooms without educators undermine the social contract and push parents to reduce their working hours. Conditions in individual daycare institutions have also drawn scrutiny in recent years.
Stockmarr said she wants a full picture of municipal budgets before the consultation. She said she fears cuts in the daycare and children’s area because municipalities are under financial pressure.
