Iceland review - 2007, Qupperneq 28

34 ICELAND REVIEW
As I open the heavy metal door into work in the morning, I
am greeted by loud laughter, excited chatter and occasional
tears. “I went to the mall yesterday and saw two girls with
green faces,” I am informed gleefully by a young man deli­
bera tely standing on my feet. The air is warm and smells suspiciously
like over­ripe banana and milk in the early stage of rotting, but my
mind moves quickly to the excitement of breakfast. Normally it’s some
variation on cereal, yogurt and fruit, but Fridays are all about the toast,
cheese and hot chocolate. In my workplace we have nap time every
day, and if we are good on Friday afternoons, we have milk and cookies.
Needless to say, every Friday is like Christmas.
Tempers f lare, as they do in every workplace, and only this morning
somebody threatened to throw my mother in the dustbin. But I rose
above it, defused the situation with humor and put his shiny black
Wellington boots on before he even had time to remember what he
had been complaining about. Later on, the same person gave me a hug
for no reason at all. Yes, the people I work with can be confusing and
diff icult at times, but they are in their element dealing with rampaging
dinosaurs, small cars in need of servicing, blue and red saucepans full
of cake and babies who live naked on shelves. I am not often welcome
to join in at such crucially important times but I am the only one who
can read, so I have my uses. You guessed it: aside from writing, my
other job is part­time teaching assistant for two­to­six year olds.
Icelandic children don’t start compulsory education until the age of
six, but in reality they start as young as two and sometimes earlier still.
The leikskóli system has profoundly changed the lives of Icelandic child­
ren and parents, but some feel they are becoming victims of their own
success. The word leikskóli literally means play school but describing it
as such in English is problematic because the children stay there all day
without their parents. However, it’s also not wise to think of it as a
crèche or day care center because it is so much more than that, which
is why this article uses the Icelandic word.
Once the reason for allowing parents to go back to work, the leik skóli
has morphed into the first step of education and a crucial place of social
interaction and acquired manners. But the step up from ‘day care’ to
‘school’ requires a plentiful mix of qualified leikskóli teachers and high
quality, dedicated assistants.
The now­booming economy may be partly credited to the fact that
parents have been allowed the chance to work fulltime by the existence
of cheap child care, but the resultant high wages and low unemployment
may conversely be responsible for the current leikskóli staff ing crisis.
Reykjavík has 80 public leikskóli schools and 15 independent ones. In
2008 the council would like to fill 1,350 full­time positions, which
would mean around 1,750 staff members. As it stands now, though,
Reykjavík leikskóli schools are 120 employees below the level needed to
function properly. As a result, more than 200 children are on a waiting
list, unable to take up their rightful places.
Reykjavík is not alone in its desperate recruitment drive, but the
national picture is not quite as bleak as the media tend to intimate.
Ice land’s second largest town, Akureyri has 14 leikskóli schools and no
staff shortage whatsoever. The Reykjavík suburb of Gardabaer has ten
and no staff shortage either. So why the dis crep ancy?
In Akureyri, 75 percent of the leikskóli staff are qualif ied teachers, a
situation that ensures loyalty, stability and quality education for the
children. This high teacher­to­assistant ratio is mostly a good thing,
but teachers cost more than assistants do. In Reykjavík, only 45 percent

If you predicted half a century ago that the average four - year - old child would spend the same amount of time at school every day as a
teenager, you’d have been laughed right out of the playground. But that’s exactly what’s happened. The Icelandic leikskóli has
liberated parents and changed the very concept of childhood. But there’s trouble afoot.
Growing Pains
by alëx elliott Photo by Páll StefánSSon