Kindergartens | A giant daycare center for more than 300 children will be built in Espoo – Experienced researcher: “A terrible mistake”

“Before it was said that only the best is good enough for a child, but now we’re looking for some sort of minimum”, gasps the experienced early childhood education expert, docent Marjatta Kalliala.

He refers to the current trend of making kindergartens bigger and more efficient all the time. New daycare centers, at least in the capital region, are almost always facilities for hundreds of children.

HS reported in October About the giant daycare center coming to Olari in Espoo. The new daycare building has early childhood education places for a total of 336 children. When completed, the nursery school will be the largest in Finland.

Kalliala opposes giant daycare centers to the core. He trained kindergarten teachers for decades and has researched, for example, play. Even in retirement, he wants to promote the cause of small children, and many little ones spend a large part of their days and their important first years in kindergarten.

Currently, new daycare centers are being built for the next 50–100 years. The key words in their design are efficiency and conversion flexibility. According to Kalliala, space solutions are driven by cost savings and not by the needs of the children.

“It’s a terrible mistake,” he says.

“At the moment, the starting point seems to be that even less is enough for a child. But how far can this go?”

Yet In the 1990s, kindergartens were mostly small or at least moderately sized. In recent years, the cities have almost competed to see which of them will build the biggest kindergarten. At the same time, smaller old kindergartens have been closed down and demolished.

Before 1990, a kindergarten could not have more than a hundred children. In the RT card guiding the construction, the mention of the limit of one hundred children was removed only in 2010.

Giant daycare centers are therefore a relatively new phenomenon.

According to Kalliala, especially in Helsinki, daycare centers are designed to be far too cramped, because in addition to other spaces, air cupboards and closets are included in the square footage used by the children. In addition, Helsinki implements the new daycare centers smaller than the instructions for the RT card guide.

“Joint use of facilities is the magic word that ensures that everything runs smoothly by implementing it. However, children are moved like pieces on a game board from one space to another during the day,” Kalliala says.

“For example, in the common dining room, toddlers have to eat without delay, because the next groups are already waiting for their turn. This requires a minute game.”

Especially with small children, eating, dressing and undressing often require time and flexibility. Now it isn’t.

“In practice, the extreme use of facilities increases the stress of children and employees.”

According to Kalliala, especially for a child with, for example, sensory hypersensitivity, a day in a large kindergarten is very difficult. Continuous playing of the status game also takes up the staff’s working time.

Long According to Kalliala, the design of the daycare centers was guided by the desire to feel like a home and an understanding of the child’s needs and spatial experience. Each group of children had two spacious rooms at their disposal, where they also ate and slept in addition to other activities.

The little ones were helped with meals and then escorted to the next room for a day’s rest. In their own home area, the children also learned to use the environment independently, and the best games could be continued even in the following days. Own group spaces were complemented by small group spaces and a kindergarten hall.

According to Kalliala, the current daycare centers are no longer designed for their most important users, i.e. children, but for adults. In new kindergartens, for example, the furniture is designed on the scale of adults.

“Shouldn’t a child climb to a water point when adults can’t bend down,” Kalliala says.

“Everything is inspired by the fact that daycare centers are made first and foremost with economy in mind. I think that kindergartens would work well if there were no children there.”

Also outdoor spaces are pinched.

Kindergarten yards should have space for adventure and play, but now the yards are small and cramped areas covered with asphalt or rubber mats. In the worst cases, not a blade of grass grows in the yard.

“Children should be able to move freely and play outside for long periods of time, but now they are forced to act unilaterally.”

At its worst, the children’s congestion in the giant kindergartens is in the afternoons, when most of the children are outside waiting for their parents.

According to Kalliala, the daycare center should have a sense of homeliness on the outside as well. That’s what the new kindergartens don’t do now:

“Today’s giant kindergartens look pretty scary from the outside. They don’t invite a small child.”

Read more: “Stupid” – In Espoo, a huge kindergarten is being built in a place that everyone thinks is bad