Preschool education in Kyrgyzstan

kids on children’s playground carousel

According to the official data of 2018, in Kyrgyzstan, preschools have reached an enrollment rate of 24% of children of pre-primary school age, an almost 2% increase from 2017. Latest official statistics for 2018 show that there are 620,000 children in the age range of 3 to 7 years old who can go to kindergartens. Among these, nearly 187,000 children attend the 1390 kindergartens of the country. Among all the kindergartens, 1248 are state and municipal institutions, while the rest are private schools. A year ago, there were 1294 kindergartens in Kyrgyzstan, which covered 173,000 children.

Currently, the birth rate of the country exceeds the world average. According to the Ministry of Education of the Kyrgyz Republic, people need more preschool education and preparation for primary school. While in 2012 there were a little over 590,000 children ages 2 to 6, in 2017 there were already 779,000 of them (+ 32%).

It is important to note that in order to ensure accessibility to preschool education in Kyrgyzstan, an electronic queue has been introduced. The main goal of the program is to provide transparent and equal conditions for the admission of children to state schools and eliminate corruption. Thanks to the innovation, from February to July 2018, citizens submitted 9079 applications to the electronic queue, and 1176 children received places in kindergartens. Preschool preparation program for 2017-2018 covered 116 thousand children. That is almost the100% of children aged 5 to 7, which is 21,000 less than in the 2016-2017. Villages in remote areas of the country also saw improvements in 2017-2018. 120 kindergartens with short programs were opened and almost 10,000 children attended them. Moreover, 310 teachers were trained and certified for the education of these children. Moreover, after the process of optimization of the spaces for general educational institutions, 100 preschools are currently operating jointly with primary and middle schools. Thanks to this, the state managed to reach another 7358 children with preschool education.

Thus, to ensure high-quality educational processes in preschool educational organizations, the state has approved the balalyk educational and methodical program. Kindergartens are also provided with over 70 titles of schoolbooks and materials in Kyrgyz and Russian languages, including additional informational literature for teachers, as well as book collections, fairy tales, didactic and other educational materials.

However, the need for kindergartens in Kyrgyzstan is still growing, since all the structures are overcrowded. Considering the data, in order to have enough space for all the children from 2 to 7 years, it is necessary to build 1793 structures with a typical design capacity of 250 children each.