UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL AT FIVE

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How many five year olds are still excluded from preschool in Albania? Where do they live? And

what would it cost to get them on board?

For: the Ministry of Education and Science, and the UNICEF Office in Tirana

By: Jan van Ravens, Yale University

September 2014

Content:1. Executive summary page 12. Rationale and introduction page 13. Arguments to prioritize the five year olds page 24. How many five year olds are excluded? page 55. Costs per child, depending on context page 86. The overall costs of enrolling the five year olds page 11Annex 1. Analysis of data on preschool enrolment page 13

1. Executive summary

Jointly commissioned by the Ministry of Education and Science and the UNICEF Country Office, this paper estimates the number of five year olds that are still excluded from preschool education, as well as the additional recurrent costs of enrolling them. While the benefits of preschool attendance are well known, the paper presents arguments why these benefits are particularly large when financial resources are assigned to universalizing preschool education for the five year olds.

To this end, preschool capacity in urban areas needs to be expanded by 6424, nearly half of which in Tirana and Dürres. This can be done very efficiently by a two-shift system, whereby one teacher, using one space with inventory and materials, attends one group of five year olds during three hours in the morning, and a second group in the afternoon. In rural areas, 9386 place need to be created, sometimes at higher costs per child. Reaching children in particularly remote and sparsely populated areas may be very costly, but the paper presents a number of models to mitigate these costs while maintaining quality and impact.

Assuming a good and fair teacher’s salary (fulltime for a fulltime job, but halftime for those who teach just one group during three hours a day) and a 50% top-up for non-salary items, we find that in the order of 314 million Leke annually would be needed to close the gap for the five year olds. This is less than one percent of the current education budget. It can easily be found in the budget increase that would result from policy efforts (increasing the education budget from 3% to 5% of GDP) or even from GDP growth alone.

The author wishes to thank both the Ministry of Education and Science and the UNICEF Country Office for their guidance, as well as Juna Miluka, Head of the Department of Economics and Finance of New York University in Tirana, for making data from the Living Standards Measurement Survey available for analysis.

2. Rationale and Introduction

Worldwide there is a strong movement towards expanding and eventually universalizing preschool education. This is driven by insights from the sciences that are directly relevant to child development but also by findings from the science of economics, more in particular the sub-discipline that focuses on the “returns” (benefits, profits) on investments in various services for children and their mothers. Triangulation from both angles – child development and economics - points invariably to significant benefits, especially for disadvantaged children.

There is no need to elaborate or review these insights in this paper. The Government of Albania has issued various policy statements that underscore the need to expand preschool education, such as the Action Plan for Children 2012-2015 and the Albanian National Education Strategy on Integrated Early Childhood Development (including its A.6

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Addendum). Another important step was the commissioning of a report on “The development of preschool education in Albania: perspectives, policies and costing”, by Alain Mingat and Eneida Hoxha in 2010. The fact that this excellent report has not spurred the expansion of preschool education may be related to the rather high costs that it estimated. This was due to three factors:

The unit costs were based on the then current practice, while, as this paper will argue, important efficiency gains will be possible, especially in urban areas, if some relatively minor reforms are pursued;

The population and enrolment data in the 2010 report are now outdated; this paper will benefit from the 2011 Census as well as the Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) conducted in 2012;

Most importantly, the Mingat/Hoxha report looked at the entire age preschool age bracket of 3 to 6, while this report will zoom in on just the five year olds.

The arguments for the focus on age five are presented in section 3. Section 4 will make an estimation of the number of five year olds that are still excluded, broken down by prefecture and, within the prefectures by locality (urban or rural). Section 5 argues that the unit costs (the costs per child per year) depend on the type of program and the geographic context, paving the way for the 6th and last section which estimates the overall costs of universalizing preschool for the five year olds.

3. Arguments to prioritize the five year olds

The official age range for preschool education in Albania is, and will remain, age three to six. Ideally, all children should enter preschool at the age of three and stay enrolled until they make a seamless transition to primary school. This is the policy in all countries in Central and Eastern Europe, in nearly all OECD countries, and in the vast majority of all countries in the world1. It is also in accordance with the broadly shared, scientific finding that age three is the age at which children, while continuing to learn through play, should engage in group learning experiences2 for enhanced socialization. Yet, the question is: what is, departing from the concrete situation in Albania now, the best pathway towards universal access at age three? Do we direct our efforts at each of the three age cohorts (the three, the four and the five year olds) at the same time, regardless of social background? Or do we prioritize a certain age group?

Figure 1 presents the current rates of attendance for the three age cohorts in Albania. For reasons explained later in this paper, the figure is based on data collected in 2012 by the

1 See annex table 3b of each of the annual EFA Global Monitoring Reports issued by UNESCO.2

Engle, P.L. et al, 2007. Strategies to avoid the loss of developmental potential in more than 200 million

children in the developing world. The Lancet; 369: 229-42.

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Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) rather than the official statistics. This is also why we speak of the actual attendance of children, rather than their official enrolment.3

Figure 1. Children that are attending or excluded from preschool education, by age (2012)

Age 3 Age 4 Age 50%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

ExcludedAttending

It is clear from figure 1 that large numbers of children aged three and four are excluded from preschool education: 86.8% and 69.3% respectively. To include all these children may take a long time. And given the higher unit costs4 it will also require considerable financial resources.

Less extreme is the situation for the five year olds, where 58.5% are attending and 41.5% is excluded. At these rates, the relative deprivation of the excluded children tends to become inacceptable: in many primary classrooms in the country, the children with preschool experience are in the majority so that teachers may have the inclination – consciously or subconsciously – to base their teaching on the ones with preschool experience rather than the ones without. For the latter it will become increasingly difficult to survive the lower grades without repeating grades or without low learning achievement. And in areas and communities where few children have preschool experience at all, entire schools may stay behind compared to the national level, seeing few of their students progress to higher education levels.

A second set of arguments to focus on the five year olds lies in the fact that attendance of - and exclusion from - preschool is never socially neutral. Consistently, household surveys from around the world show that children from low income groups, with lowly educated

3 Attendance refers to the children that actually visit preschools on a regular basis. It is measured in household surveys by asking parents whether their child has visited a preschool in, for instance, the last 4 weeks or last 3 months. Enrolment, in contrast, refers to the official inscription of children in a preschool. For reasons that are discussed later, enrolment data are higher – and less reliable - than attendance data in Albania.4 For the three and four year olds, groups are usually (or ideally) smaller than for the five year olds, which raises unit costs. Moreover, specific low cost solutions that are feasible for the five year olds are less feasible for the three and four year olds, as we shall see later in this paper.

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mothers, and from rural areas, are at higher risk to be excluded from preschool. The latest direct indication for Albania dates from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) of 2005 (see figure 2, below) but little suggests that disparities by income, maternal education and locality have eased since that year. Hence, it is much more appropriate to focus on the excluded five year olds than to pursue a more general strategy of expansion across all age groups, which could lead us to a situation where, in a manner of speaking, the 90% most advantaged children of three, four and five years old are enrolled, and the 10% most disadvantaged of any age remain excluded.

Figure 2. Disparities in access to ECE by location, mother’s education and income

Finally, there is a set of arguments in the area of “impact” that point to prioritizing the five year olds. Many studies have measured the influence that attending preschool education has on a child’s early competences. Rigorous secondary analysis of these studies has shown that more years of preschool seem to be related to larger gains, but the added impact of an additional year is often smaller than the gains typically experienced (……) from one year of participation.5 In other words, the money that the government of Albania would have to invest to provide the currently excluded five year olds with one year of good preschool education yields a much higher return than investing that same amount of money in a second or third year or preschool for the more advantaged children.

Hereby, we need to keep in mind that the (initial) impact of attending preschool on a child’s competences spills over: via the child’s later performance in education and in work, towards the entire economy. This effect is stronger for disadvantaged children. Shorthand, there is a wealth of arguments to quickly universalize preschool education for the five year olds, whether we look at child development, at child rights, or at the wider economy.

5 Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Christina Weiland, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Margaret R. Burchinal, Linda M. Espinosa,William T. Gormley, Jens Ludwig, Katherine A. Magnuson, Deborah Phillips, Martha J. Zaslow (2003). Investing in our future: the evidence base in preschool education. Society for research in child development.

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4. How many five year olds are excluded?

To estimate the costs of universalizing preschool for the five year olds, we need to know, first, how many are currently excluded6, and second what one year of preschool costs per child (the unit cost). While the latter question will be the subject for the next section, it is important that unit costs vary according to location (urban, rural, mountain). So ideally, the assessment of the number of excluded children in this section would take this variation into account. However, data limitations force us to restrict ourselves to the distinction between children in urban areas and those in rural areas.

In order to estimate the number of excluded five year olds by prefecture, the most logical approach would have been to derive the numbers of enrolled five year olds per prefecture from the official enrolment statistics, and to subtract these from the total number of five year olds from the official population data. This approach has been tried but revealed that official enrolment statistics are not reliable.

Confronting the official enrolment statistics with the population data results in an overall enrolment ratio for ages three to six of 80%, while enrolment among just the five year olds would stand at 100%. In fact, it would actually exceed 100%: there would be more five year olds in preschool than children born in the country five years ago. For the calculations that underpin these findings we refer to Annex 1.

On the one hand, inflating statistics is a serious matter. It may be caused by a desire among preschool staff to attract extra funding: the more children, the more money. On the other hand, this strategy is to some extent understandable given the serious underfunding – especially of non-salary items - that was reported in the aforementioned Mingat/Hoxha report from 2010. It seems that in order to attract sufficient funding to operate the preschools, staff have no choice but to report more children than there actually are. The solution is obvious:

improve the funding per child and take away the perverse incentive to inflate enrolment data;

rigorous analysis of the actual enrolment in the preschools, which is best done at municipality level with strong support from the prefectures.

It is impossible to conduct a strong policy for universal access to preschool if nobody can tell how many children are currently enrolled, and how many are excluded in the municipalities.

6 For conceptual clarity, it should be noted that “the currently excluded five year olds” is an abstraction. Imagine a village somewhere in the mountains of Albania. There is no preschool, and there are 27 children of age five today, in September 2014. The plan that may result from this paper will not be implemented in a few weeks time, so these 27 “concrete” children will never go to preschool. They will go to primary school next year. However, we may assume that next year, and the year thereafter, there will again be about 27 children of age five in that village, notwithstanding some fluctuation. One could say that this village has the “demographic capacity” for there to be 27 five year olds. Hence there needs to be preschool capacity for 27 children. This is what is meant when we say there are 360 excluded five year olds in urban Shkoder. Of course, even this demographic capacity may change over time. In fact, Albania has seen dramatic demographic disruptions, due to a decreasing birth rate and due to internal and external migration. For the medium term, however, the Census of 2011 does not foresee big changes in the number of five year olds, so this paper focuses on the current situation.

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In the absence of reliable enrolment statistics, the LSMS is our lifesaver. It offers attendance rates broken down by locality (urban versus rural). However, it has one important caveat that needs to be kept in mind throughout the analysis: LSMS is a survey and not a census. Hence it is based on a sample. This sample is large enough to be fairly representative, hence reliable, for the country as a whole. But broken down by prefecture, the number of observations is often far too low to be seen as reliable. And so the reader needs to keep in mind that statements at national level based on LSMS are reliable, but statements at prefecture level can only be received as indicative. For a strong basis for policy and implementation, municipalities – with oversight from prefectures and with guidance from the Ministry - should produce a reliable headcount of the numbers of five year olds that are attending preschool and of those who are excluded from it. Table 1 presents the general picture of preschool attendance, broken down by age and locality (urban versus rural).

Table 1. Preschool attendance according to LSMS, 2012 Overall Urban RuralAll 33,2 42,5 22,8Age 3 13,2 18,5 8,1Age 4 30,7 40,8 20,7Age 5 58,5 66,4 46,7

Table 1 suggests an overall attendance rate of only 33% (against the 80% suggested by the official statistics) and for the five year olds a rate of 58% (against 100%+). Clear is the gap between urban and rural areas: 42.5% versus 22.8%. This gap tends to be less pronounced among the five year olds than among the younger children.

Table 2 zooms in on just the five year olds. In the first two columns (on the left hand side), the table presents the attendance rates among the five year olds by prefecture, and within these by locality (urban versus rural). The table then makes the step from attendance rates (in percentages) to attendance in absolute numbers of children aged five (3rd and 4th column from the left). This done by multiplying the attendance rates from LSMS with the absolute number of five year olds, by prefecture and by urban/rural7. Finally, the numbers of attending five year olds were subtracted from the population data, thus finding the absolute number of not attending five year olds, again for each prefecture and distinguishing urban and rural (the three columns on the right hand side).

7 The absolute numbers of five year olds were taken from is the 2011 Census. This provides absolute numbers of children by prefectures and by urban/rural, whereby children are grouped in sections of five age cohorts: 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, et cetera. For each prefecture, and distinguishing urban and rural, the children aged 0-4 and those aged 5-9 were added up and divided by ten, thus approximating the number of five year olds.

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Table 2. Preschool attendance among five year olds by prefecture and locality, 2011/2012

Attending, in % Attending, absolute

Not attending, absolute

Urban Rural Urban Rural Urban Rural TotalBERAT 89,26 69,47 600 647 72 284 357DIBER 33,25 17,23 169 254 339 1220 1558DURRES 38,2 72,78 945 699 1529 261 1790ELBASAN 85,38 28,15 1130 652 194 1665 1859FIER 46,96 27,71 638 630 721 1644 2364GJIROKASTER 81,98 82,31 306 259 67 56 123KORCE 37,91 100 326 1551 535 0 535KUKES 59,83 23,93 272 221 183 701 884LEZHE 61,81 42,11 579 322 358 442 800SHKODER 67,39 13,39 744 211 360 1362 1722TIRANE 74,69 52,41 4576 1718 1551 1560 3110VLORE 60,99 70,28 809 452 517 191 709 Average 66,43 46,65 Total 11094 7614 6424 9386 15810

Table 3 summarizes the findings for Albania as a whole. It shows that the five year olds are almost equally divided over urban and rural areas (17519 against 17001). Attendance in urban areas is much higher at 11094 against 7614. Consequently, most of the excluded five year olds live in rural areas: 9386 against 6424.

Table 3. Preschool attendance among five year olds in absolute numbers 2011/2012. Urban Rural TotalAttending 11094 7614 18709Not attending 6424 9386 15810Total 17519 17001 34519

Once again it should be emphasized that the attendance data are from the LSMS which is a survey, not a census. The sample is large enough to be reliable at national level (table 3), but at the level of the prefectures (table 2) findings should be interpreted with utmost caution. The findings should be seen as indicative, and should be backed up by local investigation.

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5. Costs per child, depending on context

Knowing the number number of excluded children from the previous section – while keeping in mind the warning at the end of it – we can now address the unit costs. This is what it costs to enroll one five year old child in a preschool program during one year. Once we know the costs per child per year, we can multiply this with the total number of excluded children, finding what it will cost on an annual basis to universalize preschool enrolment at age five.

However, there are two things complicate this exercise. First, unit costs depend on the type of program. Full daycare, with meals and dormitories, costs four to five times more per child than programs that focus strongly on child development and school-readiness. For the latter programs, some countries use the following rule of thumb:

3 hours per day * 5 days per week * 40 weeks per month = 600 hours

This 600 hour program is based on the finding that the total number of hours of attendance per day can remain limited to only three (even 2.5 hours can be sufficient), as long as there is regularity over time. So a frequency of five days per week, maintained throughout most of the year with only some minor interruptions that follow the school calendar, would be ideal. The great advantage of the three hour program compared with the four hours of the current “without meal” modality of Albania, is that the three hours per day formula allow a two-shift system in the larger towns and cities. One teacher, using one space with inventory and materials, can attend two groups per day: one from 09:00-12:00 o’clock and another from 13:00-16:00, for example. Together with the time needed for preparation and miscellaneous activities, this would result in a fulltime job of eight hours per day. This may meet with some resistance among teachers who are used to teaching four hours per day in the without meal program and receiving a fulltime salary, but this is an inefficiency that no country can afford to continue. The advantage of the two-shift model is enormous: if each group has around 20 children, we have a pedagogical pupil-to-teacher ratio of 20, but an economic pupil-to-teacher ratio of 40. In other words, costs per child are reduced significantly, while quality remains unaffected.

It is obvious, however, that this two-shift model only “works” in urban areas where it is possible to find about 40 children at an acceptably short distance from the center or school where the program is provided. This brings us to the second of the two things that complicate the calculations: the fact that different contexts require different approaches, leading to variation in unit costs.

As table 2 shows, 6424 not attending five year olds live in urban areas where the two-shift model can be applied in most cases. Almost half of them live in Tirana and Dürres, making it attractive to start a large scale project there to reduce exclusion quickly. But 9386 of the excluded five year olds live in rural areas. This is a much more diverse environment, with children living in contexts that range from small towns and villages where it is feasible easy to find 20 five year olds at short distance from a center or school – in some cases even the

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two-shift model may work – to hamlets where only a handful of five year olds can be found. In extreme cases, this will require costly solutions. It may be needed to provide transportation to some of the children, thereby keeping in mind that children aged five need accompaniment. And even if transportation is provided, the number of children per group may still remain well below 20, which also increases costs: the unit costs consist to a large extent of the teacher’s salary. If this is divided by only 10 children instead of 20, this tends to double unit costs.

This issue is not unique to Albania, and countries both in the region and elsewhere have been looking for solutions to keep costs low while respecting quality requirements. One of these solutions, also practiced in Albania, implies that it is the teacher, rather than the children, who travels, making a round and calling at two or more places in the environment. Hereby it is interesting to have another look at the 600 hour formula: 3 hours per day * 5 days per week * 40 weeks per month. While we cannot compromise on the continuity throughout the year, it is actually possible, to some extent, to “trade” duration for frequency. For example, instead of visiting a village or hamlet five times per week, one can halve this while doubling the duration of the session from three to six hours, with of course a lunch-break. This could result, for instance, in a bi-weekly schedule whereby one teacher attends one hamlet on Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the first week, and on Tuesday and Thursday in the second week (the blue days in the schedule below), while attending a second hamlet on the days in between (the yellow days):

Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Mon Tues Wed Thurs FriMorning Afternoon

By way of variation on the former schedule, one might think of a weekly schedule whereby the teacher attends both hamlets on Wednesday for half a day, accepting that the teacher needs time to travel between the hamlets so that sessions on Wednesday are relatively short.

Mon Tues Wed Thurs FriMorning Afternoon

In places where travel time is long and where the number of children is exceptionally limited, one might reduce the frequency further and compensate this by including the four year olds. The schedule could be bi-weekly with the teacher attending three hamlets on consecutive days, visiting each of them thrice per two weeks and being free of teaching duties on each last day of the cycle:

Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Mon Tues Wed Thurs FriMorning Afternoon

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So the children in these hamlets will experience a relatively low frequency of only three sessions per two weeks, but it will be full-day and, more importantly, they will receive this service during two years. Of course the national policy would remain that the five year olds be prioritized, but because of exceptional circumstances the four year olds are included to compensate for low frequency.

A final example may consist in home-based provision, whereby a local person is trained to become a qualified preschool teacher and attends children in the home. In such cases, the teacher will not have to travel, while only few of the children will. Instead, the higher cost is found in the smaller group-size that must be accepted.

Clearly, countless variations are possible. Local circumstances combined with the creativity of local professionals will determine which concrete approach suits best; this cannot be predetermined at higher level.

The questions then becomes: if concrete models are developed, or at least chosen, at local level, and if this leads to strong variation in unit costs, then how can the next higher level facilitate the implementation of such models financially? One way of promoting preschool expansion without becoming prescriptive would be to develop a funding formula which consists, first, of a Standard Unit Cost which is valid across the country regardless of context, and, second, a co-efficient that accounts for population density or similar variables such as distance between towns, villages and hamlets. So in rural areas where population density is below a certain threshold, municipalities would receive a higher compensation for every enrollee. Exactly how they spend this extra money (on teachers’ travel costs; on travel for children; on small group-size) would be up to the municipalities themselves, in keeping with the principle of local self-governance.

For the Standard Unit Cost, we depart from the monthly salary of 43000 Leke for the teacher with a higher education degree (which is to be compulsory). This we need to multiply by 12 to convert to annual salary; by 0.5 to account for the fact that teaching one group for three hours is a halftime job8; by 1.5 to account for non-salary costs (that are currently severely underfunded) and finally divide by 20 (the number of children per group). This results in the following formula:

Standard Unit Cost = 43000 leke * 12 * 0.5 * 1.5 / 20 = 19350 Leke

For the coefficients, one might think of multiplying the Standard Unit cost by a factor 2 for the most remote and sparsely populated areas; by a factor 0.8 for the efficient two-shift system where two groups share one space; and by a factor 1 for the remaining modalities. The next section will apply these variables to the data on excluded children.

8 So in practice, a teacher in a small town who teaches one group will receive a halftime salary, and the same goes for a person running one home-based class. Those who teach in the two-shift system will receive twice that halftime salary, hence a fulltime salary. The same would apply to teachers who have a fulltime job attending two or three villages.

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6. The overall costs of enrolling the five year olds

A concrete way of estimating the overall costs of universalizing preschool for the five year olds would be to request concrete expansion plans from the Prefectures. These plans would be based on:

an rigorous and in-depth investigation of the numbers of excluded five year olds in the municipalities;

a description of the different modalities (standard, two-shift, traveling teacher, home-based) that need to be applied in the various towns, villages and hamlets in the municipalities;

an estimation of the costs of realizing this palette of modalities throughout the prefecture.

This could be an inductive process, with guidance from the MoES. For now, it is possible to provide a rough indication of the overall costs of universal preschool for the five year olds at forehand. This needs to be indicative not only because of the small local samples in the LSMS (see section 3), but also because we lack concrete information on how many five year olds live in which degree of sparseness.

However, there is an indication of sparseness, provided by a study from the World Bank: about 25% of all the primary schools in Albania have 20 pupils or less. This would suggest a significant financial burden for the endeavor to universalize preschool: primary schools span six age cohorts (ages 6-12) while preschool only three (3-6), or just one when we focus on age five. So in villages with 20 children of primary school age, there would theoretically be only two or three children aged five. But on the more positive side, the world Bank also found that the total number of children within these very small schools is only 5% of the total primary school population. In other words: for some children the unit costs will be very high, but these children are not very numerous.

This fact can lead us to the following set of assumptions for a rough estimation of the costs: We assume that 5% of the five year olds live in such remote areas that for them the

unit cost is twice the Standard Unit Cost of 19350 Leke (see previous section) due to travel cost and due to the fact that we must accept small group-sizes. We also assume that few or none of these children in currently enrolled, so we apply the 5% to the total number of five year olds (which stands at 34519 according to table 3) rather than just the excluded five year olds. This results in 1726 children requiring with a unit cost of twice the standard.

We assume, on the other side of the spectrum, that all children in urban areas can be reached with the two-shift system where the Standard Unit Cost is multiplied by a factor 0.8. This concerns all of the 6424 not-attending children in urban areas.

Finally, we assume that the remaining 7660 not-attending five year olds (9386 minus 1726), though living in areas classified as rural, can be gathered in (single-shift) groups of 20 without exceptional costs. For these children, we apply a factor of 1 to the Standard Unit Cost.

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This can be summarized as follows:

Overall costs are (1726*2 + 6424*0.8 + 7660*1) * 19350 Leke = 314495550 Leke

We round this off to 314 million Leke. Four important points must be made for a good understanding of this figure.

The 314 million Leke concerns only the recurrent costs such as salaries, supplies and replacement costs of inventory. It does not include investment in new buildings or refurbishment. It is assumed – as in the Mingat/Hoxha report of 2010 – that local solutions will be found for space, such as empty classrooms in schools, community buildings, and sometimes homes.

The figure of 314 million Leke does not include inflation. In practice, it is likely that some years will pass before expenditure has reached this level, and by then salaries and prices of inventory, supplies and utilities will have risen. So the figure of 314 million Leke is just an indication of the scale of the costs against prices of 2014.

The cost estimation is partly based on the total number of five year olds that live in Albania now, in 2014. This number may change in the future. If we look at the current population profile of Albania (see figure 2 in the beginning of the census report) it seems that the number of young couples will decline rather sharply in the near future. So even if the birth rate remains the same, the absolute number of births may decline, resulting in less five year olds within half a decade. So even on the longer run, there is little reason to fear that Albania cannot sustain the funding for universal preschool for five year olds.

Finally, it should be repeated that caution is required since the figure of 314 million Leke is partly based on the LSMS which is a sample based survey, not a census. However, at national level the LSMS is much more reliable than at prefecture level.

To put the figure of 314 million Leke into perspective: this is less than a percent of the education budget. In 2013, this budget equaled a mere 3% of GDP, which is among the lowest values in Europe. There is an ambition to increase the budget by 2 percent points to a more acceptable level 5% of GDP. But even if a growth of only half a percent point would be realized in the coming years (from 3% to 3.5% of GDP) this would be much more than sufficient to cover the 314 million Leke. In fact, even if the education budget would not increase as a percentage of GDP but remain equal, it would still grow by 2.1% in 2014 and 3.3% in 2015 as a result of general GDP growth9. That increase – in 2014 alone - would be twice to thrice the required 314 million Leke10.

Clearly, the overall costs of universalizing preschool for the five year olds – notwithstanding the caveats in our calculation – cannot be prohibitive for delivering on the rights of these children. What needs to be done urgently is to scrutinize the enrolment statistics; identify

9 IMF forecast. Source: http://www.imf.org/external/country/ALB/index.htm10 Thereby we also need to keep in mind that the aspired expansion of preschool education is unlikely to be achieved within one year. Processes like these normally take a few years time – years in which Albania is likely to benefit from accumulated growth.

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where the excluded children live; decide at local level which modality suits best in concrete cases; and calculate the unit costs per modality. Make the plans and implement them.

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Annex 1. Analysis of data on preschool enrolment

Official enrolment data from school year 2012-2013 report that 23346 children olds are in the third age group of public preschool and another 1750 in the third age group of private preschool: a total of 25096. Normally, the children in the third age group are the five year olds.

In addition there are 27110 children in the so-called mixed age group (consisting of children of three, four and five years old) in public preschool, and another 1128 in the mixed age group in private preschool: a total of 28238. A substantial part of these children are also five years of age, but we cannot be sure how many. There are two defensible ways to estimate their share.

The first is to assume that one third of the children in the mixed groups are five years old. A third of 28238 is 9413. If we add this to the 25096 five year olds in the single age groups we arrive at a total of 34509 five year olds in preschool in Albania in 2012.

The second approach is to assume that the share of the five year olds in the mixed age group is equal to their share in the single age groups. So with 25096 five year olds in their single age group on a total of 53627 children of three, four and five (11498+17003+25096), the share of the five year olds is 47% and their absolute number within the mixed age group is 38311. Together with the 25096 five year olds in their single age group, we arrive at a total of 38311 enrolled five year olds.

The children who were five years old in school year 2012-2013, were partly born in 2007 and partly in 2008. The number of live newborns in these two years were 34448 and 33445 respectively, according to Instat data. Both numbers are less than the estimated 34509 enrolled five year olds under the first assumption made above, and they are far less than the estimated 38311 enrolled five year olds under the second assumption. In other words: if official enrolment data were right, there would not only be 100% enrolment among the five year olds, but there would be (much) more than 100% enrolment. There would be more five year olds in preschool than children born in the relevant years.

Clearly, this is not possible, the more so since both child mortality and migration would only further diminish the number of five year olds in the country.

To double-check the assumption of inflated statistics, we look at the development of the absolute number of preschool enrollees throughout past decades (figure 1) as well as the development of the annual number of newborns (figure 2).

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Figure 1. The absolute number of preschool enrollees (ages 3, 4 and 5), 1991-2012

1991 - 92

1992 - 93

1993 - 94

1994 - 95

1995 - 96

1996 - 97

1997 - 98

1998 - 99

1999 - 00

2000 - 01

2001 - 02

2002 - 03

2003 - 04

2004 - 05

2005 - 06

2006 - 07

2007 - 08

2008 - 09

2009 - 10

2010 - 11

2011 - 12

0

20000

40000

60000

80000

100000

120000

Figure 2. The annual number of live births in Albania, 1990-2012

19901991

19921993

19941995

19961997

19981999

20002001

20022003

20042005

20062007

20082009

20102011

20120

10,000

20,000

30,000

40,000

50,000

60,000

70,000

80,000

90,000

Figure 1 suggests that after a sharp decline in the turbulent early 1990s, the total number of preschool enrollees - according to official statistics at least - has hardly changed, fluctuating around the level of 80000. The pattern in figure 1 is very odd indeed; it seems that a number of preschools closed down in 1991-1992 causing a sudden decrease, and that the remaining preschools have simply continued to report more or less the same numbers of enrollees for two decades, regardless the real number of enrollees.

Figure 2 shows the continuous decline of the annual number of newborns: from about 80000 in the early 1990s to about 33000 in 2006-2012.

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Jointly, the two figures show that the rise in the enrolment ratio does not come from an increase of preschool capacity (the denominator); it comes entirely on account of the diminishing population (the numerator).

We may further argue that with about 33000 annual newborns in the past half decade, the total population of age three to age six is in the order of 100000. With 80000 enrollees, this would result in an overall enrolment (for all age groups) of about 80%. This is very much in contradiction with other sources such as the following.

The so-called Transmonee database of the regional office of UNICEF reports an enrolment ratio for the 3-6 year olds of 47,4% in 2009/2010 for Albania, with no clear upward trend.

UNESCO classifies Albania as one of the countries far away from attaining a 75% overall enrolment ratio by 2015.

The 2012 Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) found only 33.2% attendance, with 42% in urban areas and 23% in rural areas.

Finally, the general perception among Albanians with regards to preschool enrolment is by no means that 80% of the 3-6 year olds and 100% of the five year olds would be on board. It is obvious to most Albanians from daily observation that many children in the country are not in preschool.

From these contradictions we must again conclude that official preschool statistics are strongly inflated.

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