Objective 1. Decreasing child poverty and creating conditions for children’s social inclusion
The measures for social inclusion taken up until now have not been effective enough and there is still a big number of children who are socially excluded – living in poverty, not in a family environment, ill and without access to education of good quality;
The problem with poverty among children and families with children in Bulgaria is serious, especially in the context of the economical crisis and their situation cannot likely to change without purposeful measures for support. Every third child in Bulgaria lives in material deprivation. There is a worrying trend of increase in the number of poor single-parent households and those of children living in material deprivation. there are no specific, systematic and specially-targeted measures In the strategy towards decreasing poverty among the families with children and, respectively, of the child poverty;
A socially included child is one who lives in a family environment in the community. In that sense, the tendency for increasing the number of children, taken out of their families, is worrying. When children are placed in a “family-type” environment, a “residential service in the community” is a questionable alternative because it is not defined correctly and the amount of time they spend there is unclear. As a result it is worrying that the number of such type of services and the children who are placed is growing fast as well as the number of children taken out of their families;
The service network does not include all categories of children and families there are no services for children and families which are not in the range of the risks determined by the Social Assistance Act. The social services in Bulgaria are not orientated towards the families with children, they are practically missing, i.e. the system of social services is not orientated toward supporting a child in its family. Instead, it works with the consequences of it - children already at risk.
The range of services for children at risk is significantly bigger than the one for families – practically there are hardly any services for families;
There are no services which support parents in being better parents i.e. to have better parental capacity and thus guaranteeing children’s social inclusion;
The system has not yet been developed enough to succeed in capturing the various amount of needs of the client at the different stages, all types of risks and clients;
The services that already exist are provided only in some cities, sometimes only at one place, i.e. the access to services is limited.
Objective 2. Providing all children with equal access to preschool and school education of good quality
The equal access to education focuses the attention on the conditions in the school environment as well as the network of services and the infrastructure that should make it easier for every child to exercise its right to education. The strategy implies a very narrow view of the term “equal access” – on one hand paying attention to the presence at school, considering the reasons for absence, but not in sufficient details and not for all groups of children. On the other hand, the quality of the education and taking up measures is a not a subject of discussion in the National Strategy for Children (NSC) at all, as though it is assumed that it is of high quality by default, but just not all children have access to it. In this sense the subject of education gets away from the focus of the NSC. Moreover, the literacy of the Bulgarian students is relatively low (around and below the medium level in the countries in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and has not changed significantly in the last few years (of the evaluated period). The students in the small towns and villages are far less educated (with far poorer performance), which means that the system does not provide all the children in the country with equal access to high-quality education;
In support to the above, with the existing conditions in the education, there is no direct connection between being enrolled in school early (the amount of children enrolled at an early age remains relatively high during the years) and dropping out later, because it usually happens at a higher grade – shortly, the amount of children in preschool is relatively high, but dropping out is still a problem. The reasons are rather in the school environment and the approach, than the entry to the system. In that sense the anticipated measures for introducing obligatory preschool education even at an earlier age – for 5-year olds (since 2010) and 4-year olds (sine 2016), are extensive (i.e they prolong the stay in the system), instead of intensive (i.e. to improve the quality of the system);
NSC does not focus on the school as an vital factor in the process of supporting the individual development and prevention of the social exclusion, nor does it focus enough on the school as an environment which solves the problems of the students and which provides resources for support of the education and development of all the children who need it. This means that NSC has not actually influenced the processes in the Bulgarian education, nor has it envisaged any mechanisms for such influence.
The current educational system is not orientated towards working in synchrony with the other systems related to children (the social and the health system);
The Bulgarian school does not recognize the individual needs of all children, therefore it can hardly provide an educational service that takes individual needs into consideration. Besides, there is no data collected for specific groups of children which require special educational approach. There is a lack of methodologies for work with different groups of children, there are not enough specialists, especially when it comes to different types, the progress of children with Special Educational Needs is not assessed.
