A nursery in HCM City. VNA/VNS.Photo Thu Hoài

HCM CITY— HCM City has seen the decrease in violence against children at small private nurseries in industrial parks and export processing zones thanks to a project to develop private small nurseries in 2015-20, Dương Anh Đức, vice chairman of the city People’s Committee, told a conference held to review the project on Thursday.

Besides the skills required to care for children, teachers at these nurseries were also trained in professional knowledge, he said.

Lý Thị Sương, the board’s deputy head, said the project’s steering board had provided teaching aids and toys to and installed cameras in 51 nurseries.

Small nurseries too were provided with technical assistance to improve quality, she added.

The project was carried out in 10 districts with industrial parks and export processing zones, where the number of children aged less than 36 months old going to nurseries was 32 per cent.

The cost was nearly VNĐ14 billion, with more than $9 billion coming from the city's budget and the rest from other sources.

Before the project began, 52.6 per cent of the total women workers at industrial parks and export processing zones had children aged less than six going to nurseries and kindergartens. 

But only 19 per cent of them had children in public kindergartens.  

In the coming time the city will continue to invest in building more public kindergartens at industrial parks and export processing zones to meet workers’ demands.

The city’s district authorities will strengthen inspection and close nurseries operating without licenses or not ensuring safety for children.

Trade unions in the city and its districts will encourage employers to subsidise the cost of sending their workers’ their children to kindergartens and nurseries.  

Nguyễn Thị Gái, chairwoman of the Trade Union at the city Department of Education and Training, said the city is carrying out a pre-school education development project for the 2021-25 period.

It aims to ensure 35 per cent of children aged one to three and 95 per cent of children aged four to five are sent to kindergartens and nurseries.

The rate of children going to private educational establishments will be more than 60 per cent by 2025.

The city is trying to have enough pre-school teachers by 2025, with 90 per cent of them graduating from colleges for training them.

The city has 1,352 kindergartens, 467 of them public ones and 885 of them private, and 14,931 large public and private nurseries and 1,739 small ones. VNS