The justness of preschool education in Serbia: Ensuring equal opportunities

Živka Krnjaja and Dragana Pavlović-Breneselović

Summary:  This paper begins with looking at the justness of preschool education through ensuring equal opportunities for each child to education. It encompasses an analysis of the strategic and legislative frameworks used to achieve justness, and analyzing the preschool education system according to the following criteria: coverage of children, availability of the network and capacity, number of children enrolled in preschool institutions, ratio of children to adults and inclusion of children from sensitive groups. The analysis shows that strategic and legislative-level documents reveal official supposition of the achievement of justness through ensuring equal opportunities and respecting the principles of positive discrimination. In practice, however, developments in the preschool system have not followed the direction of those strategic and legal documents. There is no unified database of preschool children in Serbia, nor of the preschool education system as a whole. The coverage of children in preschool education and the availability of preschool networks and preschool facilities are regionally uneven, with the lowest numbers in the least developed regions in Serbia. The final section of this paper presents a critical review on the prevailing discourse on justness in education.