Czech authorities promise 400 free hours of Czech language for children of foreigners
As Radio Prague notes, in the past 2019-2020 academic year, over 26,500 foreigners studied in Czech public schools. Only some of them received the right to free additional classes in the standard volume of 70 hours. Only 21% of the total number of children of migrants settled in the Czech Republic who needed language support were able to attend additional Czech lessons.
"I never cease to be amazed that many schools, although everything is spelled out in the law, do not know how to work with the relevant regulation. Not all schools also seek help from specialized pedagogical and psychological counseling, although everything is simple.
If a child is referred to us, we conduct the necessary assessment of their language proficiency, and then choose the degree of support measures. A school, for example, can expand the class schedule of specific students by three additional Czech lessons per week. In addition, students from among foreigners are given the opportunity for one or two individual intensive consultations with a teacher, which are held after the end of the main classes," comments Natalia Schneiderova, coordinator of work with foreign migrants at the Pedagogical-Psychological Counseling Center of the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic.
Note that the rules in effect until recently provided for language assistance only to minor descendants of migrants, although sometimes Czech children from mixed families, where household members communicate in foreign languages, or children who, due to their parents' professional obligations, lived outside the Czech Republic for a long time and have not mastered their native language, also need this kind of support.
Such children include, for example, Natalka Lackova, who besides her Czech name also has a Vietnamese one, and the language of the country where her parents worked is essentially her "first native language." Natalka Lackova lived in Vietnam until the age of eleven and studied at a Vietnamese school until the end of the fifth grade.
"I started learning my native language only after returning to the Czech Republic. We approached the principal of the Czech school with a request to allow me to repeat the entire fifth-grade program, but we were refused. In the class where I could have been enrolled, there were simply no free places. The principal only said that she was confident in my abilities and that I would manage," says Natalka Lackova.
Natalka Lackova initially had to overcome the lag, which took three years, practically on her own. Her parents were very busy at work. It was good that the Czech language teacher understood the situation and always gave her student the opportunity to correct bad grades.
With classmates, things were different. "I don't like my classmates, and they hate me. The fact is that when I came to class, I could only say 'yes,' 'no,' and 'I don't understand' in Czech. No one wanted to talk to me. I cried and didn't want to go to school. The hardest period was the 6th grade. It was horrible. I already felt like an outsider, and they constantly mocked me on top of that."
Natalka Lackova was helped to finish school and stop feeling like an outcast in her own country by the organization Meta, where she started attending additional classes in the eighth grade: "I went there once a week. Later, I also prepared with them for the entrance exams, which I passed successfully.
Meta takes very good care of its students. They always asked what needed help, what was more difficult for me. I think Meta took better care of me and helped me more than the public school I attended," says Natalka Lackova.
It was the organization Meta, which specifically deals with the issue of education for young migrants, that became the main critic of the new program to support the teaching of the Czech language to children of foreigners, presented by the Czech Ministry of Education in 2020.
Meta, for example, drew attention to the problem of a selective approach to schools that will handle language training for foreigners when distributing funding.
According to experts from Meta, schools with a small number of students will not be able to receive subsidies, which means that children of foreigners will have to attend lessons in other schools designated by the regional administration. For example, no one has thought about how children will get to these schools, as Natalia Schneiderova, coordinator of work with foreigners at the Pedagogical-Psychological Counseling Center of the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic, emphasizes.
To the ministry's credit, the program director of Meta, Kristina Titěrová, emphasized that the department took into account almost all comments.
The most important thing is that the total number of hours allocated for additional classes with foreigners who need to improve their Czech language proficiency has been expanded. According to the new rules, it is no longer 70 but 400 hours of free classes per year.
Children with Czech citizenship who need additional classes in their native language because they have spent a long time outside their country, such as Natalka Lackova, are also included in the new program. Schools, as the Ministry of Education has provided, will receive the necessary additional funding for their education.