Free kindergarten places now apply to all children under three, with the government planning to cover 120,000 children and budgeting for an additional €100 million in funding.
According to the 2024 state budget, which the government presented on Tuesday to the Assembly of the Republic, free kindergarten will cover children up to three years of age, as originally envisaged in the implementation of the “Happy Kindergarten” measure.
We are talking about children born on or after September 1, 2021 and who will be three years old by the start of the 2024/2025 school year.
In addition to this, free kindergarten also applies to all children from 1st and 2nd income families.
In the most recent assessment of this measure, in September, on the occasion of the anniversary of the opening of Creche Feliz, the government announced that it had 85 thousand free places, 9 thousand of which had been created in the previous two months thanks to a decree to increase response capacity.
When the agreement between the government and the social assistance and solidarity sector was signed in July 2022 to formalize the measure, the Prime Minister estimated that the measure would reach 100,000 children by 2024.
Free kindergarten was introduced in stages, and the current government budget projects that 120,000 children will benefit from free kindergarten, including children born after 1 September 2021 and children from lower income families.
Initially, it was planned that free places would only be in institutions of the social and solidarity sectors, but later the government extended this measure to kindergartens in the commercial sector.
“The increase in the scope of the measure is due to the increase in the number of kindergartens to two children per room and the simplification of the process of converting social response rooms for children into kindergartens, with the additional strengthening of PRR. [Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência]which responds to an increase in recorded demand,” the document says.
The government claims that “this measure is fundamental” not only because it “promotes the holistic and sustainable development of children”, but also because it “helps increase the disposable income of families with children, especially younger children”, in addition to “enabling parents children have a better balance between family and professional life.”
The Government today presented the Government Budget 2024 (OE2024), which revised gross domestic product (GDP) growth upward in 2023 from 1.8% to 2.2% and downward from 2.0% to 1. 5% next year.
The unemployment rate has been revised upward for next year, now forecast to reach 6.7% in 2024, up from the previous 6.4%.
On inflation, the executive branch is a little more pessimistic, forecasting that the inflation rate will fall from 8.1% in 2022 to 5.3% in 2023 and 3.3% in 2024.
The proposed law also calls for the best budget balance in a democracy: 0.8% of GDP in 2023 and 0.2% in 2024.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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