Government invests €80m a year in early-years education

The Luxembourg government will be spending around €80 million a year on early-years education policies which includes the plurilingual crèche reform which came into effect in October.

The new law means all crèches, both private and public, have to introduce Luxembourgish and French to children aged between one and four years if they are to qualify for the chèque-service. Parents will benefit from 20 free hours of childcare at the crèche for 46 weeks a year and low-income families will be entitled to tariff reductions for children up to 12 years old.

Education minister, Claude Meisch, said the new initiative, which aims to better prepare children for the multilingual environment of their school years, will cost in the region of €80 million per year.

"The future starts early," he said during a presentation on Tuesday evening. "The first years are the most important for learning languages and success at school depends on that.

"It's a big investment because I'm convinced Luxembourg can't have young people with no opportunities -- we need a maximum potential for each child to be able to drive it [Luxembourg] further. That's why we invest in equality."

Meisch claimed that by introducing Luxembourgish and French from early years, children will go into primary education better prepared to learn through German and will be more likely to enjoy learning through French in secondary school if they are first introduced to the language through play and a step-by-step approach, rather than a more strict, language-class environment.

He also said language is the reason behind a number of school failures and said having to learn through French in secondary school comes as a "shock" to many pupils, who often consider it as a foreign language and not a mother tongue.

The investment into the plurilingual crèche reform aims to tackle this problem and hopes children will develop a closer contact with the language.

He also encouraged fathers to take the extended parental leave which became effective from December last year and welcomed the new law, passed last month, which will give dads whose babies are born after January 1 next year 10 days of paternity leave instead of two.

(Heledd Pritchard, heledd.pritchard@wort.lu, +352 49 93 459)