Everyone agrees on one thing: the school ecosystem is going through great turbulence. We are forced to change perspective when the challenges become too great. We are also forced to work together to have more. Today, we cannot do without the collaboration of all the people who work at the school to ensure the optimal development of the student.
When the student is placed at the center of the continuum of services offered at school, daycare services emerge as important players. This also makes it possible to move away from the dominant teacher-centrist vision to recognize the place of each worker on this continuum.
Today, virtually all primary schools offer the service (there are 1,813) and it is estimated that 60% of primary school students attend it (more than 340,000 students). From an exceptional measure when they were created in the 1970s, they have therefore become the norm.
In some cases, students spend more time with educators than with teachers. This shows how important it is in the educational success of elementary school students.
For too long, school daycare has remained in the blind spot of this continuum of services. Juxtaposed with existing school services, school daycare struggles to feel integrated into the ecosystem. In the current state of things, however, the school no longer has the means to deprive itself of their collaboration.
We believe that concrete actions must be implemented to update the place and role of school daycare and rethink the interactions between its staff and all school workers.
From their inception, school daycare services have been faced with the challenge of taking their place in an existing structure. Despite rapid development during the 1990s, they remained a separate bubble. We managed growth, but we forgot to build on all the potential that school daycare could offer the school.
The school organization as we know it today is a legacy of the 1960s. At that time, we were in the midst of the Quiet Revolution and we dreamed of Expo 67; the world has changed a lot since then, the school daycare too! The staff has become educators and works with activity programs that are embedded in the school’s educational project. Let’s become builders again! When we put the student back at the heart of the school, daycare services come out of the blind spot!
This text is proposed on the occasion of Quebec School Daycare Week, which takes place from May 15 to 19 under the theme “School daycare: a universe of discoveries”.