The pre-school shall provide favourable conditions for the child successively to develop its communicative ability in interplay with its environment. The child should become increasingly aware of all its innate means of expression, exploiting them in words, sounds, movement and images.

The pre-school shall provide the conditions necessary for a favourable conceptual apparatus to emerge in the child, so that it prior to the commencement of its schooling understands fundamental concepts, and understands a certain interplay between concepts and simple system relationships. The child is to acquire not primarily knowledge, but a method of learning; it is to acquire a capacity to utilize concepts in the solution of problems, and in creative activity.

The purpose of the pre-school is thus in various ways to complement the family, in offering every child optimal conditions for its social, emotional, physical and intellectual development. Close contact and co-operation with the child's parents are a necessary condition for the pre-school being able to provide a good basis for the child's development.

The aims set for the pre-school stress its function of supporting the child's personality development. During the early years, it is particularly important that each child should establish an inner security, and be put in a position to learn co-operation with others.

The child is to be given opportunity to develop its innate emotional and intellectual capacity in a rich, many-facetted manner. In the long term, its upbringing in the family and pre-school is to lead to independence, initiative, and a capacity for empathy in the situation of others. Communicative ability and a capacity to learn different ways of acquiring knowledge are more important in the pre-school than knowledge in the quantitative sense.

The pre-school shall not anticipate the school proper by putting an emphasis, for instance, on reading, writing, and arithmetical skill. The child is to proceed at its own pace. This means that the child, in its interplay with other children and adults, shall have the opportunity to develop its innate capacity, with an emphasis alike on co-operative ability, communicative ability, and the learning of concepts. Communicative ability involves not only linguistic development, but also an awareness of one's own innate powers of expression in respect of words, sound (music), movement, colour, form and image. It is important that the pre-school should seize upon the child's ability to experience all these means of communication.

Before attending school proper, it is important that the child should understand fundamental concepts, and how certain things function in interplay with each other.

The need to renew the pre-school's internal and external environment The placing of the pre-school in the town plan is important. Children need contact with different everyday phenomena, with working life and leisure activities, with people of all ages, and with the countryside. All planning should start from the children's needs and from an awareness that the area in which the children live, and attend pre-school and school, is usually their absolutely dominant experiential value. There is a need for open-planned premises for the pre-school, which permit a variety of activities to be under way simultaneously without colliding, and an efficient utilization of surface. Space should be planned in such a way that meals, sleep and rest do not encroach upon play. The pre-school's indoor and outdoor environments must complement each other, and it should be easy for the children to transfer between them.

With the climatic conditions prevailing in Sweden, allowance must be made for the fact that both children and staff will necessarily spend most of their time indoors for long periods. Planning that fails to take this into account will have a negative effect, forcing both children and staff to comply with excessively strict common routines.

The pre-school must also offer the children an exciting outdoor environment, rich in fantasy and variation. Planning should start from an attempt to give the children freedom of choice - building games, gardening, games in the sand-pit, movement games of different kinds, opportunities to play together, or alone. The various activities that are planned by adults, and in which adults take part, must be complemented by free games without adult control at places outside the range of adults.

Pedagogic patterns in the pre-school

As a general characterization of the pedagogic pattern implied by the selection of objectives and theories made in respect of the pre-school, the Commission on Child Centres has adopted the term dialogue pedagogics». The methodology of dialogue pedagogics assumes that a continuous dialogue should take place between children and adults, on both an inward and outward level, with a mutual giving and taking in respect of feelings, experiences and knowledge. The child-adult dialogue involves respect for the child as an active individual, and is a necessary condition for the child experiencing meaningful human relationships that will lead in the long term to the child itself developing such relationships».

This means that the educationist also sees himself as an individual in an ongoing developmental process; this, in its turn, affects the way in which he functions at work. The mutual interplay between adult and child makes it possible to liberate the

child's resources. This interplay can subsequently also function as a model for the child, since it illustrates the terms of co-operation—namely, to give and to take.

Instead of evaluating what the child does, checking its knowledge etc., the adult should interpret the child's behaviour as expressing its conception of its environment. The child should learn to collect, with a critical attitude, new facts to which it adopts an own position, rather than learning that there is a correct answer to questions, a given solution to problems.

The pre-school's attitude towards the child's way of learning is that the child learns continuously and in all situations, from the feeding situation to games with cyphers and letters. The early years are dominated by routine situations that relate to feeding, dressing and undressing, pot training etc. The child's interest is also focused on these situations, which offer a wealth of opportunities to develop the pre-school's subsidiary pedagogic objectives. It is thus entirely alien to the Swedish pre-school to speak of care as something distinct from pedagogics. The adult, the educationist, has in every situation the function of helping the child by structuring its learning opportunities, and expanding its environmental orientation. The child learns by acquiring concrete experience in different fields. The role of the educationist is to stimulate and expand the child's growing interest, and to initiate that which is judged to be suitable - but which the child itself is incapable of realizing.

The child learns by imitation and identification; the adult, whether he likes it or not, functions as a model, so that it is important to stress the child's indirect learning process. It is essential that adults should function with each other in accordance with the objectives set up for children by the pre-school, solving conflicts, making decisions, and giving and taking responsibility. Co-operation between parents is also of decisive importance, as is co-operation between sibling groups, in which the older children can function as objects for imitation by the younger.

The corner-stones of the pre-school adopting a pattern of dialogue pedagogics are thus interplay and co-operation: children-adults, children-children, and adults— adults.

Objectives for the expansion of Swedish pre-school facilities

The following theoretical objectives can be set up for the expansion of pre-school facilities in Sweden:

The pre-school shall promote the right of every individual to a favourable environment in which to grow up. It means the right of all children to attend a pre-school, a year or more before compulsory schooling begins.

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The pre-school has a special duty to fulfil in respect of handicapped children. It means the right to pre-school facilities from an early age of children with special requirements by reason of handicaps.

The pre-school shall also meet the varying demands of parents, to permit the latter to function alike as parents, independent individuals and citizens of the community. In the long term, pre-school facilities shall be offered to all children from an early age, i.e. the age at which they need expanded extra-family contacts. It means the right to places at full-time pre-schools for the children of gainfully employed or student parents.

When can the needs of these different groups be met?

On the basis of its calculations regarding future expansion and the demand and supply of staff, the Commission on Child Centres has tried to indicate the times at which it will be feasible to meet the demands of these different groups. In this context, it has been impossible or unrealistic to set a date other than for when it will be possible to meet the right of all children to attend pre-school a year or so before compulsory schooling

starts.

The proposals of the Commission on Child Centres are as follows:

1. It is proposed that a general pre-school, with a minimum of 3 hours' attendance per day, covering to begin with all 6-year-olds, be introduced as from 1975. By the terms of this proposal, all children, once they reach the age of 6, will be given a place in a parttime pre-school, unless they already hold a place at a full-time pre-school. Subsequently, the situation should be reviewed to create a general pre-school for all 5-year-olds. It is proposed that this general pre-school for 6-year-olds should be free of charge.

In those exceptional cases where the parents reject the pre-school, the primary issue is the child's own best. If the child is placed in a pre-school against the definite will of its parents, conflicts can arise that will ultimately have a negative effect on the child. In such cases, the local authority should establish contact with the parents with a view to inducing an understanding for the child's situation and needs before school starts.

Otherwise, it would be the duty of the local authority to see that the child's personality development was promoted in another way, e.g. by activities in a play-group. This could apply, for instance, to a child with few peer contacts, a child that is oversensitive to introduction to a larger group of children. In such a case, it is naturally of particular importance that the local authority gradually assist in preparing the child, gently and carefully, for the onset of compulsory schooling, so that this is not experienced as a

shock. In the exceptional cases where a child fails to continue in the pre-school later in the year, the local authority is to establish renewed contacts.

The Commission has considered it important to establish the general pre-school in law, to create guarantees that all 6-year-olds are actually reached and given places. The child's right to attend a pre-school cannot be considered as guaranteed, simply by places being made available for those whose parents have reported an interest. In such a case, there is a risk that many of the worse-off children (immigrant children, children from socially and financially inadequate environments, children isolated in sparsely populated areas etc.) who most need the pre-school would be left out of things. It is in respect of these children that the pre-school demands most resources, but it is for them too that it is most essential.

In those instances, however, where case-finding activities indicate very grave shortcomings in the child's entire upbringing situation, ultimate resort can naturally - as at present - be made to custody under the Child Welfare Act. To a greater extent than previously, the pre-school should be able even in such cases to constitute a positive aspect of family-therapeutic work, before the question of custody arises.

Almost 70% of all 6-year-olds at present have pre-school places in a day nursery or nursery school. According to the local authorities' own plans, some 130,000 places in the part-time and up around 20,000 places in the full-time pre-school will be available by 1975 (for approximately 110,000 6-year-olds). This means a total of approximately 150,000 places in a general pre-school by 1975. Since, however, the availability of preschool places is at present very unevenly distributed, the expansion planned means that certain local authorities will not have catered for all 6-year-olds by that year. At the same time, a number of local authorities will have a capacity also for younger children. The demand for a general pre-school implies certain special efforts, over and above those already planned, for between 5,000 and 10,000 children. A high proportion of these children live in sparsely populated areas. Owing to their own and the family's isolation, the children there need to establish an early contact with other adults and peers via the pre-school. Against the background of current experiments by the National Board of Health and Welfare with pre-schools in sparsely populated areas, the Commission on Child Centres maintains that it is often best, for purely practical reasons, to provide a two-year pre-school for children living in such areas. Owing, for instance, to long distances to and from the pre-school, it is often possible to arrange a pre-school in such areas only for 2-3 days a week, for a total of up to about 10 hours per week (the part-time pre-school in urban areas covers at present 15 hours per week). It is proposed that the pre-school should cover at least 600 hours per year. Such local authorities as by reason of long distances etc. can provide pre-school facilities only for 3 days a week or less, can divide the pre-school into 2 years. By the terms of the proposal, the pre-school should then cover a total of at least 800 hours for 5- and 6year-olds.