Švietimas: politika, vadyba, kokybė /Education Policy, Management and Quality

51-52

Authors: Editorial Board

Cover, SPVK/EPMQ, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2020

54-57

Authors: Rita Makarskaitė-Petkevičienė

Journal’s introductory article deals with preschool and pre-primary education actualities. At the end of November, the President of Lithuania signed Education law amendments. From the year 2023, the conditions for the social risk families bringing up preschool age children (5-6 years) should get better, because municipalities are obliged to ensure pre-primary education for all children. There were a lot of discussions up to that. Municipality and parents’ forum and other organisation representatives expressed worries. Municipalities state lacking kindergartens, preschool and pre-primary education teachers, educational environments are not arranged for such age children, etc. Parent representatives fear if their children are not seated in a school desk as first formers, and learn from textbooks, and so on. This problem is essentially solved; 800 are planned to be requalified, among them preschool and pre-primary education teachers. The project “Innovations in the kindergarten” closing next year should significantly contribute to education content creation, and so on. Changes in preschool and pre-primary education are grounded on neuroscience research and recommendations as well.

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Authors: Dalia Dambrauskienė, Reda Ponelienė

Activity areas of the head of the educational institution include school administration and management, purposeful use of human and material resources to ensure the quality of education. The school context influences the heads’ working day and their time distribution; therefore, it is relevant to conduct research to evaluate the contextual factors determining the opportunities and limitations of heads’ working time planning. The aim of the research is to investigate the distribution of working time of pre-school institutions’ heads for performance of different functions and to reveal the opportunities and limitations of working time planning. The study was conducted in 2018-2019. During the first stage of the study, one head of the pre-school institution from each of three European countries (Lithuania, France, Italy) was surveyed. The results of the survey have shown certain similarities in heads’ activities due to the specificity of the head’s work, starting with the formation of strategic aims, parents’ and social partners’ involvement in the institution’s activities and finishing with the assessment of the quality of the institution’s activity. Given that heads of different countries work in quite different contexts and under different working conditions, it is not appropriate to draw summarising conclusions, but the obtained data can be used in developing the methodology of analogous research. During the second stage, the topics of planning the working time of the heads of pre-school educational institutions were analysed. The heads of Siauliai pre-school educational institutions, involved in the study, have revealed that they spend most of their time working with the documents of the institution, solving personnel and financial issues. In other words, the activity prevailing in the work of the heads of Lithuanian pre-school institutions is administrative-bureaucratic processes, while the heads themselves are inclined to use part of that time for supervision and improvement of the educational process and for their own professional development. Although one of the head’s functions is proper and timely planning of activities, and thus, of their own working time, in practice obstacles to time planning, related to management of human and material resources and multi-tasking, when several activities differing in content and scope are performed simultaneously, are encountered.

106

Authors: Editorial Board

End page, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2020