Kindergarten experiences

by Carol
(UK)

In my experience, the state funded ones are better and cheaper, but much more difficult to get in places in. The main advantage of the private ones is that they typically expect to provide childcare on every working day of the year, whereas the state ones have long holidays and close for random days here and there.

A real concern with the state ones is that a child had meningitis and they didn't tell the other parents.

I do have another complaint against the state nurseries. I sent my son to the local one when he was four. He'd gone there for a couple of hours day when he was three and it had been a good experience. However he got a new teacher when he was four and after just a few weeks, my son changed from happy and easy going into a fretful and anxious little boy.

I couldn't understand it, so I asked the teacher if anything had happened at nursery and she told me that she'd devised a series of things to make the children lose their confidence and be subdued. She gave me the example of one little girl who wore classes, so she encouraged the other children to make fun of her. In my 4 year old's case, she had put him in a race each day against the six year old boys so that he would come last and be teased about it. I can still see her looking at me with a mixture of empathy for what she'd done and also doing that shrugging what-did-you-expect sort of thing that anyone who lives in Dalmatia will recognise.

I never sent him back and we used the private system the following year.

I thought the teacher was just a one-off nutter, but then someone who worked for me was talking about it on a night out with her boyfriend and his friends. It turned out that one of the the other girlfriends in the group was a trainee nursery teacher and she argued fiercely that the teacher had done the right thing because this is what they are taught to do at college as a means of control.

So if you do send your children to Vrtic in Croatia, then you need to monitor carefully what the teacher is doing in case you get another graduate of that training school!