Vershinina N.A., Lagutina J.V. The Regulatory Framework for the Home-Based Childhood Education and Care Services in Modern Russia
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Vershinina N.A., Lagutina J.V. The Regulatory Framework for the Home-Based Childhood Education and Care Services in Modern Russia // Preschool Education Today. 2017, Issue 7 -
p. 46–57.
This work is licensed under a Сreative Commons Atribiution - NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Abstract
This article unfolds the specifics of how various forms of home-based preschool education are employed in the Russian Federation. Home-based preschool education and care is a new form of education for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers and can be differently organized from a legal point of view. The authors define typical models of early childhood education and care in homeschool environments: tutoring services, family-run preschool groups, family-run kindergartens, and home-based kindergartens. This article pays special attention to those models of homeschool education where the caregiver is a mother of one, some, or all of the children, and the pedagogical process occurs in the apartment or private home of the mother-caregiver. Research was conducted in the form of content analysis of discussions between mother-caregivers on the social network “vkontakte.” Through this research, the authors discovered some typical difficulties of early childhood education and care in homeschool environments. The following issues were discovered in home-based preschool classrooms: organizational issues associated with receiving approval for the opening of a home-based preschool classroom from educational authorities, from the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing, and from the Fire Oversight; the establishment of labour relations with the head preschool; pedagogical problems with respect to the design and implementation of the preschool curriculum, the organization of individual and group educational situations, and the arrangement of informative walks. In family-run preschools problems have arisen in relation to the legal arrangements necessary for a self-employed person, bookkeeping and work without fines, as well as with attracting potential clients for paid preschool education and/or the caring and supervising of children. Within the article, the necessity of quality assurance in home-based preschool classrooms is pinpointed and solutions to these problems are suggested.